Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Artistic integrity: Not dead, just rare

I was quietly impressed by the request of the Deep Purple lead sing Ian Gillan to fans exhorting not to buy a recently re-released live recording of the band performing at the Birmingham NEC in 1993 because it was a bit shit. He could just as easily have let Sony to continue to sell the CD and raked in the royalties but he asked fans not to bother because it was just before the band split and was extremely ropey. On top of that, Sony BMG apparently didn't tell him they were planning to re-release it (which probably miffed him a bit) and it has now withdrawn it form sale. So there are still some musicians who aren't just miserable, grasping egotists who don't give a stuff about their fans. Which is nice.

Listening to: Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Magic rollers

I have just spent the evening helping a friend paint his new flat to cover the years of vile colours and second hand fag smoke. Can someone tell me why it is when using a paint roller that you roll and roll and roll until absolutely no more paint will come out but if you then go to wash out the damn thing several spare gallons will magically appear from it necessitating what seem to be several hours of washing out?

Anyway, I am going to Ireland for the weekend (family do - how very thrilling. I am going to miss all the 6 Nations rugby AND going to see Bath vs Saracens with my mates. I am not impressed) so no posts until Monday when no doubt I will be able to rant about how rubbish Easyjet and Bristol airport are, assuming the plane hasn't skidded off the runway in a ball of fire because there was a bit of drizzle that morning. In the meantime, I'll leave you to ponder just how bloody lucky this chap is.


Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Snobbery and posthumous recognition

I first heard of Nick Drake some years ago whilst listening to a cover CD from Mixmag (August 2001 issue, if you're interested), which was part of a series called The Bedroom Sessions. Essentially, these CD's were mixes done by various artists from the world of dance which comprised a selection of their influences and this particular one covered the British house/pop crossover outfit Faithless. There were a number of worthy old-skool hard hitters such as Nu Yorican Soul, Dillinger and A Man Called Adam, some contemporaries like Bent and MJ Cole, and plenty of stuff I'd never heard of, including the last track which was called Riverman by some bloke called Nick Drake.

I fell in love with this track immediately. It has a dreamy end-of-summer feel to it due in no small part to Drake's incredibly soulful voice and an unusual rhythm (5/4 for all you music nerds out there). I listened to it a lot but never quite got round to finding out more until recently. Just a few weeks ago I got hold of two of Drake's three studio albums, Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon. Both albums are filled with fantastically evocative folk tunes, in the case of Pink Moon they are largely unaccompanied save for Drakes voice and it is absolutely timeless; I just don't tire of it.

For those of you who have never heard Nick drake, you can read more here, but in a nutshell, he was a self taught folk guitarist (but also played piano, clarinet and saxophone very well by all accounts). He dropped out of a Cambridge University scholarship just 9 months before graduating but was sorely under-appreciated at the time and he constantly struggled with depression and insomnia. He , like most musical children of the sixties, smoked cannabis and occasionally took heroin, LSD and magic mushrooms, none of which would have helped the depression, but tragically he died at his parents home aged just 26 from an apparent overdose of antidepressants, although some of his friends believe it may have been accidental as he was beginning to be positive about his life and music after a bleak few years and that he took more antidepressants in an effort to increase this feeling of positivity rather than kill himself.

Whatever the reason, he left behind a small musical legacy which sold very, very little at the time. But a strange thing happened: After his death, his popularity and fame slowly increased and now he is cited as one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century with artists such as Jose Gonzalez, Badly Drawn Boy, Peter Buck (REM) and Robert Smith (The Cure) citing him as a major influence. Drake was very keen on unusual open tunings on the guitar (whereby if the strings are played with no fingers on the fretboard, you get a chord) as well as some unusual cadences which makes it hard to try and copy his work, as I have found out in trying, with some success and a little help from other web sites, to play Pink Moon.

It's tragic that such a talented artist should die so young and that he should not get the recognition that he deserves whilst alive, although he is not unusual in this. But the biggest tragedy, to my mind, is the utter snobbery he encountered in the folk music world in particular and the music industry in general. He did get some favourable reviews but he got far more which were indifferent or even disparaging. The music press was more interested in rock at the time as the lo-fi 60's sound gave way to the rock influences which grew up in the same decade and morphed into prog rock and eventually punk, glam and a host of other sub genres. The reviewers evidently figured that if it wasn't rock, then it wasn't any cop (although music journalism is generally so far up it's own arse even today that the same still applies).

But what grates most of all is the folkies and their reaction. Folk is generally a fiercely traditional genre and there's nothing wrong with that in itself, but sadly it became obsessed with its own dogma and was (and in many ways still is) personified by a paunchy middle aged bloke in a chunky cable knit sweater with a beard you could hide in. Although this character undoubtedly still exists today, I have no doubt that if Drake had been releasing those albums exactly as they are but in the here and now, he would have been immeasurably more successful commercially as the folk genre has loosened up and recognised that there is such a thing as contemporary folk music. Folk was the music of the people and it was ever changing. It is not until recent times that followers attempted to nail down their definition of what was and wasn't folk music, but these 'traditionalists' shunned Drake, it seems, for his non-adherence to their assumed norms of the genre.

This is something noted by the ever witty Mark Radcliffe in his autobiography, Showbusiness, The Diary of a Rock And Roll Nobody:

"They are the kind of imbeciles who will walk out in disgust if you have the audacity to miss out verse sixteen of 'Sir John a'Gaunt's Lament'...He'd had a bellyful of sweating buckets over his Martin acoustic only for some grizzly, bespectacled barmpot in corduroy plus-fours to come over and say, 'Not bad, but I think you'll find that "The Merry Milkmaid of Wessex, she did meet a ewe inseminator, oh" should be performed unaccompanied.' It was impossible to sate their appetite for historical accuracy"

Narrow minded people like this dismissed Drake and that would be a knock for anyone but he took it particularly hard which is a shame because it no doubt contributed to the circumstances which led to his death. Musical snobbery is still rife today, but at least listening audiences are more willing to judge music on it's merits and appreciate it for what it is.

So, the moral of todays story, kids, is not to dismiss a new way of doing something because 'new' doesn't mean 'bad' in most things. I didn't actually mean for this post to go on so long but there you are. Since it would appear I do actually have some readers (yay!) it would be quite nice to get feedback on whether or not you enjoy my ramblings, so leave a comment if you've enjoyed it and leave one too if you thought it was just a load of old cobblers.

Listening to: Slam - Alien Radio

Monday, February 19, 2007

Kate Moss? No thanks, I prefer Charlotte Church.

There's been a lot of fuss about size zero models recently (well, American size zero - thats a UK size four but I suppose that doesn't sound as good in a headline) and the organisers of the Madrid Fashion Week banned size zero (or unhealthily thin at any rate) models from their catwalks last year and this year's Milan fashion week is seeing many fewer size zero models. About time too. These really skinny models just look hideous. Why starve yourself to a medically unsafe weight when all it does is make you look like a crack head who's one bong away from croaking? You can see the ribs and spine on some of these girls and that's about as attractive as the Black Death in my view. Honestly, I've seen more meat on a skeleton.

And it seems that I'm not alone. Sure, there are chaps out there who like that sort of thing, but I reckon the vast majority prefer girls to have a bit of flesh on them. This is borne out to some degree by a poll carried out, bizarrely, by Fox's Biscuits to find who people rated as the most naturally beautiful. Top of the list was Kate Middleton, current Squeeze of second in line to the throne, Prince William followed by Charlotte Church who is still being boffed by that lucky git pretty boy and Welsh inside centre, Gavin Henson.

That's all as it should be, two stunning girls with great figures at the top. But at number four is the uber stick herself and known associate of oxygen-thief Pete Doherty, Kate Moss. What? The woman is painfully thin and looks like she'd snap in a stiff breeze. She needs to eat something, badly. Most of the rest of the top 10 is also good (Catherine Zeta Jones, Scarlett Johansson, Beyonce, and Keira Knightly who, although a bit thin at times, is naturally so rather than looking like a famine victim). But squeaking in at number 10 is the utterly hideous Victoria 'Posh' Beckham. What the hell? This woman is utterly, utterly repugnant. What on earth is she doing in that list? I suppose it goes to show that some people like the skinny look, but judging by the rest of the list, most people prefer women to have curves.

And that's the crux of it, I reckon. Curves. If I see an attractive woman with curves, I can't help but look and admire. It's not about having huge baps or 'booty' as the kids call a nicely shaped bum these days, but about being womanly, beautiful and proud of it. That is such a huge turn-on for most guys and they would much rather have that than women starving themselves for some perceived improvement in attractiveness or, in the case of models, saleability.

As for me, well, my list would certainly include Charlotte Church but also Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones, Violet Berlin and Kate Sliverton. I like curvy women and fortunately, there seem to still be plenty of women who have a firm hold of reality and a sense of perspective in life and don't try and alter their body shape to the possible detriment of their health. And long may it continue.

Listening to: Foo Fighters - Skin and Bones

Saturday, February 17, 2007

My god, he's got...space dementia!

You know, sometimes I think about the possibility of an asteroid hitting earth and killing us all (cue any number of disaster movies) and I conclude that we're pretty much doomed should a near earth object (NEO) end up being so near that it's touching us in a quite terminal way. But fear not! The Association of Space Explorers (no, really) has come up with a proposal to create a plan (organised by the UN, an outfit who would struggle to sit on a toilet the right way round) to save us in the event of a giant asteroid heading our way.

I feel so much better.

Logical reasoning? No thanks, I've got religion!

Ever wondered exactly what the difference is between science and religion? Well, here it is in flowchart form. Don't you just love dogma?

Geek alert

I'm going to go all geeky on you for a minute or two. If you aren't even remotely interested in technology, then look away now.

An article in Slashdot caught my eye claiming that in the past five years, server power consumption in th US has doubled. At first, I thought they meant each server had doubled it's usage but it seems that what they mean is that overall consumption by servers in the US has risen from 0.6% of consumed electricity in 2000 to 1.2% in 2005. This is attributed to all sorts of things including the rise of the Blade centre.

But, from experience, it seems that Blades often replace old, inefficient servers and are capable of doing more on a per-unit basis which means that in a fair comparison of, say, productivity per watt consumed, the new systems win out for efficiency. On top of this, many organisations are installing large server farms but then getting rid of traditional desktops for users and replacing them with thin client terminals and Citrix environments on those shiny new Blade farms. I would be interested to see what the power consumption difference is between the two models but I'll be willing to wager that it is lower with the thin client/server farm option than having all those desktops sitting about the place.

As a result, this article seems a little disingenuous. I would be very interested to see if there have been any comparative studies done between the two models mentioned above and the efficiency of new vs old servers to see if the headline rise in consumption is automatically a bad thing or if we're actually reducing overall consumption per user by increasing our server farm sizes.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Run Forrest, run!

Last week, I was overcome by a strange and irresistible urge to go for a run. Now, this was odd on more than one front. For a start, I'm a bit of a lard bag if I'm being honest. Obviously, running would be a good thing to help shift some of that flab which would be doubly handy as I seem to have agreed to take part in a 12 hour mountain bike XC enduro race (as part of a team of 8) at this years Bristol Bike Fest. So being a chubber is not, in itself, a problem although the reason I am currently carrying some excess pie, as my mate Chris who's from Yorkshire would put it, is because I'm basically lazy. I have a desk job and when I get home I like to do very little. Yes, I occasionally go out on the bike at weekends, something else which will have to increase in frequency over the coming months, but exercise and I are long lost acquaintances.

In my youth, I lived in the Fens and cycled everywhere. At 6th form college, I used to go to the gym three times a week too and even at university, where my full time smoking really took off, my second year was almost entirely devoted to Kung Fu sessions which probably explains my lack of academic achievement that year. But after that, it all melted away and I got porkier and lazier.

I gave up the fags over a year ago now (not that it feels like it sometimes) but recently I hit my heaviest ever weight. Despite me saying I'm a lard bag, I'm not some morbidly obese blob, but I do have a bit of a gut. I got to 16 stone (although bear in mind, I'm 6 foot 1 and have a broad build so it's not as bad as it seems) and I realised something must be done. I'm fluctuating a bit now so it's been at the back of my mind to get off my arse and do something. Which brings me back to this running malarkey.

I never liked it. Even when I was fit, and I tried running I didn't like it. So why the hell do I now have this urge to run? For years I have taken the piss out of runners safe in the knowledge that they were as mad as a bag of badgers and now I find myself as one of them, pounding along the pavement, lungs on fire and muscles screaming in protest. Things is, I got the urge again today (must be a Thursday thing as it was Thursday last week too) and I went again. And I'm planning to go more and more. Worse still, I timed myself last week and this week, and was gratified to note that I was a whole 2 minutes quicker. In fairness, this was entirely due to me slowing to a walk when I ran out of steam rather than just stopping as I did last week, but I still felt a frisson of pleasure in beating last weeks time and I'm quite enjoying it, once I've stopped feeling like I'm going to die.

I had best admit that my run is not very long (a less-than-impressive 0.89 miles according to mapmyrun) but then I'm quite unfit so I figure I'd best start small and when I can comfortably run that without stopping I can start to increase the length a bit and build it up. But still, I have spontaneously begun to be a bit more healthy and I wonder if this is just me growing up a bit. I'll be 32 this year but I never really think of myself as being that age. In my head I'm still a young lad (early 20's I suppose) in many ways. Not the going-out-on-the-rage-every-night way, but then maybe it's more a symptom of being the youngest sibling by 4 years that I've never seen myself as a proper responsible adult although I suppose I am just that.

Well, I just hope it lasts because I'm definitely going to need to get fit for the Bike Fest, but that's another story altogether.

Listening to: Classic Euphoria Disc 1

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Doctor who?

The abomination formerly know as 'Dr' Gillian McKeith has been told by the Advertising Standards Agency here in the UK that she must stop using the title Dr as it is misleading. Brilliant! Common sense prevails!

For those of you not in the know, this hideous woman (apparently referred to in medical circles as 'The Awful Poo Lady' - all will become clear) has made a very large pile of cash punting alleged health foods, potions, lotions and powders along side lucrative book and TV deals. Just how much of the health food products are snake oil is probably a question for debate on it's own, but it's her idiotic claims and utter babble which she tries to pass of as science, along side the use of the title doctor which really annoyed on regular reader of badscience enough to do something about it. It would seem her doctorate came from a correspondence course in America and carries no accreditation over here. She plays on this by wearing a lab coat and poncing about in what appears to be a lab on her Channel 4 TV show "You Are What You Eat" whereby she visits some terrible lard ass and takes a sample of their poo which she pokes about in on the telly (not something you want on at tea time) and then berates them for eating kebabs.

Now, you might think "What's wrong with that? Surely any prod given to fat bags to stop them eating themselves into an early grave and draining the NHS is a good thing?". Well, yes it is, but the nonsense this woman spouts under the pretence of science is frightening. I won't go over it here as there is an excellent article on badscience which lists a number of the inanities that have issued from her trap like the malodorous turds she likes to play with. Suffice to say that, as noted in the article, she seems to have failed to grasp the concepts of basic pre-GCSE level biology entirely. It is pap of the highest order and will be instantly recognisable to readers of New Scientists Last Word column as the kind of thing which deserves to be publicly derided lest anyone who might be a touch naive is taken in by it and believes it to be the truth. And there are plenty who would believe her because she calls herself Dr and wears a lab coat, mores the pity.

So, good on the ASA for upholding the complaint and delivering a well-aimed kick in the cobblers to another tranche of the moronic pseudo-celebrity mumbo-jumbo which pollutes our media. Goodbye 'Dr' McKeith - you won't be missed.

Listening to: eels - Beautiful Freak

Saturday, February 10, 2007

And now for something completely different...

Well not really. This is just filler until I write something worthwhile (playing a poker tournament or two tomorrow so you never know I must just rant about that). OK Go, one of my current top listens, are getting a rep for minimalist but inventive self-directed videos for their songs and this one (for the single Invincible) is no exception. You may well have seen the others as they did the rounds last year (they're on Youtube and I highly recommend taking a peek if you haven't seen them).