| Crossword Help (Araucaria) Needed |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|11:04 am] |
Clearly I don't post to LiveJournal much any more despite my best protestations, but this is an emergency. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) miss_newham sent me a sheafs of Guardian cryptics as a wedding present, which I happily resort to when Victoria, BC, becomes too intellectually deadening. I have successfully completed No 24,712, but it being a convoluted Araucaria I can't work out why the answer to 13 down is (as it must be) RAINWATER:
13 One of 8 (where 3 is 19) keeps Walter, a faller (9)
The answer to 8 should be REPARTEE, to 3 TITHE, to 19 RIVALS. The crossword has a Richard Brinsley Sheridan subtheme, with SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL, CRITIC and RIVALS among the answers. RAINWATER is clearly a faller, Walter can probably be WAT, but how is "One of 8, where 3 is Rivals") RAINER? Alas, long absence from the groves of crosswordeme has clearly rotted away my brain, for after a short period of mental gyration I do not know. Mockery on a postcard. |
|
|
| Last Entry 7 Weeks Ago? |
[Sep. 9th, 2009|07:54 am] |
Where does the time go? I did spend *some* of the last 7 weeks getting married, photographic proof of which you can find on Facebook, but even so... I miss you people, and by extension LiveJournal, and so I'm going to try to write in here more often now.
I should start with business and make a report on what went down with the LPM Voice magazine that several of you were kind and productive enough to submit articles before. As editor, I signed off on all the content on August 5th, receiving a cheery assurance from my colleague that "we'll get it all laid out tomorrow and distribute it at the weekend". When I next got in touch with Jeremy (the owner), almost three weeks later, I found out that it had taken approximately two days for the layout team to down tools and stop answering their phones and emails, leaving behind them an Adobe InDesign document so riddled with mistakes and basic design errors that you'd have beaten a tiny child for bringing it back home from kindergarten.
I would have redone the entire issue myself, except I couldn't get InDesign CS 3 to set up on any of my house computers after about four days of cajoling, and the CS 4 trial was somehow completely incompatible with our document. During this long, dark techy weekend of the soul I also discovered that an external hard drive I'd bought had died before I'd gotten a chance to use it FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS YEAR. I'm never buying an external hard drive again, apparently all you have to do is pick one up and put it down again and you're left with a $100 paperweight.
Anyway though, Jeremy and I laboriously fixed up the issue over email and eventually, before the end of August I believe, 650 copies were printed out and distributed in Seattle, containing articles by luminaries such as venta, alawston and tahs. Hurrah! Unfortunately it looked a lot more like a scrappy fanzine than the professionally-done-but-for-having-a-budget object that my colleagues had spoken of at such length beforehand! Boo. But there's new talk of having found a printer who'll do us 2,000 quality copies for a reasonable price next time round, and maybe the layout team won't drop the ball, defecate on it and then set it on fire like last time.
The long and the short of it is, I am once again looking for articles of a broadly music-related nature that will be published in some four-figure quantity in Seattle later on in September. As a special concession to would-be writers, we're looking for shorter pieces this time round, say 750-1,000 words would be more than fine. (Though really, going over or under isn't a problem.) As a special unconcession, ideally we'd like these in in a week, circa September 15th, and almost certainly by September 22nd we'd be entering the realms of actually too late.
I promise to write about something fun next time! And that next time will be soon! |
|
|
| Anyone Wanna Do Some Music Writing? |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|10:38 pm] |
I have to go to bed, so I'm going to try to cut a long story short here. The crappy online music magazine I've been doing some desultory writing for over the past year is trying to sort its sh*t out and become a proper twice-monthly printed magazine, to be distributed for free on the streets of Seattle (and hopefully paid for by advertising). To actually be any good at all it's going to need more readable and engaging writers and fewer of the functionally illiterate chancers who were previously happy to froth and spout off in a magazine that frankly I don't think anyone was reading.
Which is where maybe you come in. There is some talk of paying a token fee to writers (something like $10 for 1000 words, which is much more than the salary of exactly nothing they're offering me to being an editor) but it would be incautious of me to promise that at this stage. What I think I can promise is your name on an article in a published magazine, and a copy of said magazine to show off to people: if it does take off and start paying for itself then all well and good. Obviously as this rag will be mostly circulating in Seattle, all material has to be at least potentially interesting to the man on the street in the Pacific Northwest, but honestly, music's gone global by this stage, if you want to write about tiny little English bands that the world should probably know about I think we can swing that.
If anyone does want an extra published writing credit for their CV and, who knows, possibly more, do feel free to drop me a line c/o osirun@gmail.com. I guarantee you that if I've ever subscribed to your LJ you're immediately a better writer than the bad old guard that we're trying to jettison :D |
|
|
| Tolkien About Degeneration |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|04:22 pm] |
"The magic goes west, of course, but there's also the peculiar abjuring of narrative form, in the strange echo after the final battle, the Lord of the Rings's post-end end, the Harrowing of the Shire--so criminally neglected by Jackson. In an alternate reality, this piece of scripting would have earned talented young tattooed hipster video-game designer Johnno Tolkien a slapped wrist from his studio: since when do you put a lesser villain straight after the final Boss Battle? But that's the point. The episode concludes 'well', of course, so far as it goes, but in its very pettiness relative to what's just been, it is brilliantly unsatisfying, ushering in an era of degraded parodies of epics, where it's not just the elves that are going: you can't even get a proper Dark Lord any more. Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming."
I thought I hated Tolkien with fanatical passion, but China Mieville gives me pause in this brilliant article.
He's wrong about Greek mythology being less good intrinsically than Norse: the Greek stuff has had the blood drained out of it by vampire stuffed-shirt academics over centuries, as surely as time has flaked the brightly coloured paint off the friezes of the Parthenon: but read properly, the Iliad is every bit as magical and elegiac as Ragnarok or anything in LotR. I only wish I knew of an English translation I could actually recommend to you :-/ |
|
|
| Asking The Big Questions |
[Apr. 22nd, 2009|10:50 pm] |
|
Here's a question I've never known (or bothered to look up) the answer to - is Johnny Marr, legendary guitarist for arch-miserabilists The Smith, so-called as a pun on the French j'en ai marre ("I'm fed up"), or is his name an amazing coincidence? Especially given that his songwriting parter declares himself marre aussi... |
|
|
| That's Quite A Habit You've Got There |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|03:38 pm] |
Amusing bug I found while playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars the other day. There's a crooked cop with a mission to give me, but he wouldn't tell me about it until I brought him 2 bags of coke to satisfy his cravings. "You still need 2 bags of coke," it told me after he threw me out. So I went off and did the requisite wheeling and dealing, came back with the coke, got the mission, got killed in the line of duty, pootled off and did something else instead of restarting the mission, eventually got bored and went back to the cop's apartment for another go.
Apparently I'd waited too long and he was needing another hit of coke, because it reverted to the "I'm not giving you a mission till I get my coke" spiel. Except this time, after he ejected me, the message came up: "You still need 65535 bags of coke." Eek!
I'll say one thing for Rockstar games, they certainly have a lot of potential hours of gameplay in them :D |
|
|
| Shoulderdog |
[Mar. 10th, 2009|12:36 pm] |
In the second of his Weltanschauung posts, bateleur addresses psychology, but it all turns out to be another singing of the praises of Game Theory. Now I think of game theory in much the same way I think of trigonometry, that is to say it has some useful applications and is not well understood by a lot of people, but that is still no excuse for grown men to obsess over it.
However something jumped out at me, I forget what, and prompted me to ask if the big B agreed with Socrates' famous assertion, "it is impossible to know the better course of action and choose the worse". Which he did; which he HAS to, as a math fanboy. To disagree would be like saying "I understand how to add, but it's still possible for 2 plus 2 to come to 5".
I did a lot of arguing about Socrates with my philosophy tutor at Magdalen, and I recall it well: I agreed with Socrates, I didn't see how you could know the better and do the worse. "What about when you're in bed and you know you're going to be late for work and you keep hitting the snooze button?" asked dear old Ralph Walker (a renowned expert on Kant), and I think I replied that you never know that being on time for work will be more desirable than five minutes more under the duvet. I've never failed to jump out of bed with alacrity when I've got a plane to catch, for instance. But what's so great about being a model employee?
Still, the seeds of doubt were planted in my mind, and to this day I wasn't satisfied with my account of the issue. Until, a little after the aforementioned post, my epiphany arrived. Depression, which as you may be able to tell from the general mania of my LJ has been with me all my life, is nothing more or less than knowing the better course of action and being able to choose the worse.
Now I think that bateleur and Socrates are among the lucky ones who have never been depressed. But when I stay up till 4 in the morning (work at 8am sharp) for the third day straight playing online Carcassonne, knowing I'll feel like sh*t for a week, when I sabotage and firebomb the most important relationships in my life for no reason (hopefully a thing of the past!), that's just depression working. At no point have I ever lost my ability to look at choices A and B and see that one is sensible and the other miserable, it's just that when the depression is "on" there is absolutely no concern for outcomes. So you just flip a coin, or just take the bad course because you're sick to death of everyone telling you to do the other thing when DON'T THEY REALISE IT MAKES NO F***ING DIFFERENCE IN THE END.
How happy the man or woman who always proceeds efficiently along the paths that probably lead to greatest advantage! But spare a thought for those of us lost in the labyrinth, choosing paths at random, hearing the bellowing and sometimes even smelling the breath of the minotaur.
You were my ball of string, you know, you were my ball of string. Where did you go? |
|
|
| ego custodii ipsos custodes |
[Mar. 6th, 2009|12:41 pm] |
If there is one thing, just one thing, that would improve the quality of my life, it would be the ability to turn down my housemate Thomas when he invites me to midnight showings of movies. Thanks to him I saw only about the first five minutes of Batman Begins on the big screen before passing out, and thanks to him I was up until 4 am (with work at 8 am sharp the next morning) watching Watchmen.
Difficult to know what to say about it really. Zack Snyder is the ultimate reverent adapter, but perhaps a shot-by-shot remake of a comic ends up as something less than the comic itself. The original pacing feels wrong for a movie, and there are numerous tableaux, effectively panels from the graphic novel come to life, that feel similarly stagey and stilted on a giant screen. The changes made to the script are few, thankfully, as they are not improvements, especially the mystifyingly dullified ending and Rorschach's considerably less exquisite disposal of the child kidnapper. (Probably a good idea to cut the Tales of the Black Freighter, though, given that Watchmen weighs in at two and a half hours already.)
It's mostly a great revisiting of the glories of the graphic novel, though, and the actors are mostly superb, especially an unimpeachable Rorscach and Billy Crudup's eerie turn as Dr Manhattan. Veidt is the biggest disappointment, seeming much more chinless and less serene than the golden king of the novel[1] - and his arctic palace comes across as a cheap and tawdry warehouse with a few statues scattered around the place. But all is forgiven when we get to the real reason for the existence of this movie: finally, a medium that can do passable justice to Rorschach's ever-shifting face.
If you've never read the graphic novel you should definitely do that before seeing the film, but to tide you over here's the brilliant Saturday morning cartoon version:
This Watchmen webcomic is also injokily AWESOME.
[1] I fully endorse Thomas's idea that amongst a cast of relative unknowns they should have cast Tom Cruise to play Ozymandias. |
|
|
| It Starts Out As Harmless Fun... |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|12:45 pm] |
But all I see in this movie (which admittedly I watched with the sound off) is Grant Morrison's "We3" waiting to happen.
|
|
|
| (15 Seconds Of) Fame At Last! |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|10:04 am] |
Finally! After some months of concerted attempts to ingratiate myself, I have been namechecked on my favourite steampunk encephalopodcast "The Clockwork Cabaret" (which has recently become available via iTunes, if you wanted to check it out).
I proposed the necessity of a steampunk-emo crossover because, well, "steamo", it's too good a marketing label to pass up, right? This brilliant yet horrifying concept ran away with the entire episode, to the extent that there is now a competition going on to provide album art and lyrics for Clockwork Confessional's debut album "Bloodsoaked and Covered in Gears", with a prize of a $20 gift voucher redeemable at a store that sells squid hats (this is actually true).
Obviously I MUST WIN THIS. I can do the lyrics in my sleep, but all I have to make album art with is Paint. Many of you are experts at this kind of thing thanks to the Wikipedia album art meme, I don't suppose you could knock me up a quick album sleeve? I'm thinking a Jesus figure being crucified on a giant clockwork cog. Perhaps being prodded in his wounded side by a squid, though maybe that's a little bit too much. With obviously the name of the band in a nice Victorian/Gothic script.
I know I ask a lot, but there is a part share of a squid hat in this for you. At the very least a tentacle. |
|
|
| New Music 09: The Heavy Hitters |
[Mar. 3rd, 2009|03:02 pm] |
As part of my ongoing new year's resolution to engage with music more in 2009, I have to listen to an awful lot of shash perpetrated by people who should probably know better. None of the following three albums is in my top ten of year so far, which means they are extremely unlikely to make my all-important festive fifty at decade end, but here are my impressions of the efforts of the Big Names thus far in 2009:
Bruce Springsteen, having 3 entries in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and 2 in the Pitchfork 500: "Working On A Dream" seems like a pretty bad title, but once you listen to the eight-minute shaggy dog story that is album opener "Outlaw Pete" and hugely overblown profession of love for a checkout girl in "Queen of the Supermarket" it's obvious that Bruce is feeling, if not quite hilarious, at least impish: tongue firmly in cheek, he's going through the Springsteen motions without feeling any need to (once again) write the Great American Album. He wasn't ever the Boss of me - I only really relate to him through a Badly Drawn Boy cover of "Thunder Road" and Ballboy doing "Born In The USA", both of which I still think are greatly superior to the originals. But the man is statesmanlike here and everything on the record is completely listenable. Plus The Wrestler (song) was cheated at the Oscars, and should have won Best Song, if only because The Wrestler (movie) should have won everything at the Oscars, being like twenty times as good as Slumdog Millionaire.
U2, having 2 songs in the Pitchfork 500 and a whopping 6 in Rolling Stone's list: now don't get me wrong, I don't completely hate U2. I do rather like "One", though I wish they'd stopped before they got to two. But even by U2 standards "No Line On The Horizon" is a stinker, reminiscent of being trapped in the corner by a coked-up fiftysomething bore at a really dull party where the only thing on the stereo is the hoariest old MOR imaginable. Perhaps U2 sensed this when they decided to rope in Brian Eno for a sonic tune-up, but maybe he's a coked-up fiftysomething bore by this stage as well. Anyway, save yourself the trouble of wading through this sludge, download at most the eponymous opening track which has its moments and maybe first single "Get On Your Boots", if you can sit through Bono asserting "I don't wanna talk about wars between nations, not right now, sexy boots, get on your boots!", thus simultaneously implying that his other job is as a relevant political force and sounding like a complete idiot, without throwing up.
Morrissey, having 2 songs at the Rolling Stone but 4 in the vastly more important Pitchfork 500, so suck it Bono: I think I love Morrissey slightly more than my own dad, but it's pretty much a given these days that each "new" album will be 40% petulant carping about high court judges and 40% adolescent posturing that no one could ever love him. But apart from being about to enter a record-breaking fifth decade of being a teenager, Morrissey uses "Years of Refusal" to wrestle with his own mortality in a fairly entertaining way. I don't think there's a truly great Morrissey song to be found here, though there's a hilarious bit at the end of "You Were Good In Your Time" where Moz sings "are you aware wherever you are that you have just died" - at which point the track abruptly launches into two minutes of scary Silent Hill style rumblings, moanings, sinister whale noises and incomprehensible foreign voices emanating from the next room. Apparently Morrissey thinks the afterlife will sound like a Swans song! |
|
|
| Love Lockdown |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|03:01 pm] |
If my "SO HUNGRY I ATE MY DOG" scheme doesn't pan out, I think I might find work as a where's-the-fireman. Basically I'd roll slowly up onto the scene in my engine, sirens conspiciously disabled, gaze on the situation critically for a minute or two, and then say "You called the emergency services for this?"
The real reason I'm making this post though is to tell you that I've disabled anonymous comments on my journal. Goodbye, Japanese spammers, I'll miss you! Now if you want to post dozens of bizarre and incomprehensible gibberish in my journal seemingly with the sole intention of winding me up, you'll have to get yourself an account for the purpose, like all the rest of my friends did. |
|
|
| You May Say That I'm A Screamo, But I'm Not The Only One |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|08:28 am] |
Hey, does anyone know anything about the noble popular music genre that is post-hardcore/screamo? I have to interview a band called Thursday asap and it would be good to think up some questions beyond "you haven't been having the thoughts about cutting yourself again since our last session, have you, Mr Rickly?"
Actually I've just seen that the lead singer is a big fan of Marvel Comics, so they are going to get a fantastic writeup, as per the rules of the Old Geek Network.
On a side note, I'm about apathetic patient as it's possible to get, but these Japanese spam comments do start to get rather annoying, don't they? Is there a story behind them, and did everyone else in the world just switch off their anonymous commenting like a month ago? Or else I'm thinking I could just learn to embrace their static, in the same way as certain guitarists learned to love feedback and distortion. That's right! I shall form a Japanese Spamcore band. |
|
|
| Shock Moon |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|05:07 pm] |
|
"I've come to think of madness as not so much losing one's mind, as gaining a new perspective," he said. "Marriage gives you in-laws... madness gives you in-sanity." |
|
|
| Out Out Damn Spot |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|02:32 pm] |
|
"Forget leprechaun gold at the end of every rainbow... I was brought up on pirate stories, and they taught me that there MUST be buried treasure about two letters before the end of every alphabet. But I've dug and dug and there never is. There never is." |
|
|
| "Food stamps? I've always wanted to mail food!" |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|10:17 am] |
Yesterday a recruitment person got in touch with me about some Web Editor position doing write-ups of hotels for Expedia, which sounded fun enough, but the true amusement came later that evening when I received a phone call from a second "recruitment professional" eagerly desiring to put my resume forward for... exactly the same job. It's quite sad to realise that there's a whole raft of people out there who must make a living googling for resumes on monster.com. They are worse parasites than Dylan-loving poetry profs!
I do need a job soon though, as admission-processing season at the university is about to run out. Walking to my guitar lesson the other night I spied a man in dark glasses milling around at the side of the road by some stoplights. He had a sign declaring him to be "BLIND, HOMELESS, HUNGRY" and a surly-looking boxer dog tethered nearby. I wasn't sure if I believed he was blind, the handwriting was suspiciously good and the dog didn't look like it would have passed its seeing-eye exams, plus if I was a blind man the last place I'd want to be was teetering precariously on the edge of traffic; but you can't accost people and accuse them of not being blind, can you, it's like when you declare someone's luxuriant beard to be fake and try to wrench it off their chin, it always ends badly.
Anyway, the point of this story is that if I don't have a new job within a week or two my ingenious moneymaking plan is to stand at an intersection in dark glasses and a sign that reads "BLIND, HOMELESS, AND SO HUNGRY I ATE MY DOG". It'd take a hard heart to withhold spare change from that. |
|
|
| Best Episode Of Scooby Doo Ever? |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|08:17 am] |
|
"Yes! It was ME who shot the deputy while wearing my Bob Marley mask. And I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for you meddling kids..." |
|
|
| Lyrical Trainspotting |
[Feb. 25th, 2009|12:07 pm] |
I hadn't thought about it much before, but when Mick Jagger sings "I can't get no satisfaction, I can't get no girl reaction", is it because he is challenging women to duels and they won't take him up on it? Slapping them in the face with his glove, whereupon they just roll their eyes and walk away? I never thought "Satisfaction" had much to say about my life before, but maybe now it does.
"Satisfaction" is Rolling Stone magazine's second greatest song of all time. Its #1 song of all time is, only partly narcissistically, Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone". A ditty which admittedly does have one of the greatest choruses ever, but also verses the likes of:
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal
It really, really bugs me when they pull in literature professors (or other worthless parasitic layabouts who can't get a real job) to be all sniffy about rock/pop lyrics in general before pronouncing Dylan one of the greatest poets of his generation. He was about as great a poet as Edward Lear. Just with better cheekbones. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|