2008s
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
My friend Paul writes about the winner of The X-Factor's shot at the Christmas number one with a cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'. Since the original is one of my favourite songs of all time, I have opinions on the matter.
Not least about the assertion that Paul quotes (without holding that opinion himself) that Jeff Buckley’s version is “often described as definitive”.
I don’t think I had heard Buckley’s version before today, but definitive? Definitive? How could anyone say that? The definitive version is, by definition, Cohen’s. And the only cover that matters is John Cale’s.
I had heard Rufus Wainright’s version. In my opinion it is too respectful. And too slow. I like a cover version that does something new with a song, that grabs it by the throat and make’s it the coverer’s own. Think of Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, or the Clash’s of ‘Police and Thieves’ Or ‘I Fought the Law’, for that matter; there are those who don’t realise that’s a cover. You could say that the Clashified version is - I don’t know: definitive, maybe.
I maybe be in danger of self-contradiction here, but I don’t think so: I fully accept that it’s possible for someone to improve on the original version of a song. I just don’t think that anyone I’ve heard has done that for ‘Hallelujah’. Except maybe John Cale.
Having done some research into the matter (Last FM and YouTube are really astonishingly cool things) Buckley’s currently stands at second-best cover version/third-best version I’ve heard.
I haven’t heard Alexandra Burke’s version, except for a fragment in a BBC quiz (7 out of 8, by the way), but I fully expect to cringe when I do.
Furthermore, when looking for Buckley’s version on Last FM, I saw a comment to the effect that the version in Shrek is Wainright. Well, (I thought) either Rufus has become Welsh; or they redubbed the film for the UK market; or some people can’t tell the difference between two very different singers. But it turns out (at least according to that same BBC quiz) that while the version in the film of Shrek is Cale’s as anyone with an ear can hear, the version on the soundtrack album is Wainwright. Strange, but doubtless to do with licensing issues.
I wonder if they replaced that terrible version of ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have Fallen in Love With)?’ from the film with the proper version for the soundtrack album?
Too long gone
Man, it's been a long time since I posted. I blame Twitter.
You could always follow me there, if you don’t already.
Also my OU course. Which, ironically or not, is on Creative Writing.
Incidentally, if brevity is the soul of wit, then Twitter ought to be hilarious.
Yes you can!
Congratulations, America! Great news.
Obama’s speech was fantastic, and McCain’s was very dignified.
Unfortunately, there is one piece of bad news: Stephen Fry tweets that California’s Proposition 8 has passed. It outlaws same-sex marriage, and is a nasty, bigoted piece of work. I can’t find any official news on it at the moment, though, so let’s hope that the good Mr Fry is just misinformed, out there in Africa as he is.
Queues
Long queues at polling places are a sign, surely, of a country recently freed from tyranny, of one that is experiencing the chance to vote for the first time (I'm thinking of South Africa in 1994, for example). They are not something that you generally expect to see in a mature democracy like the USA.
Let’s hope, then, that the people streaming to the polling stations on America are those desperate to breathe free of Bush and the Neocon hegemony, and not tiny-minded racists trying to drag the country back to the dark ages.
And remember, America: the whole world is watching.
Worrier president
There's a Warren Zevon song called 'Worrier King'. It contains the line, 'I've been up all night, worrying what November's gonna bring.' Given that US elections are always In that month, there's little doubt what he was worrying about.
If Warren had lived he’d be worrying now, and I have a shrewd idea in which direction his concerns would be facing. I’m not American, and I’m worrying. Though I can’t deny that my worry is diluted with a lot of hope and excitement.
Tuesday night’s going to be a long one, and whenever I collapse, it won’t be over. But at some point on Wednesday, there’s going to be a new dawn for America, and maybe for the world.
Edited to add: It’s actually ‘wondering what November’s gonna bring’.
A quote from Warren Ellis
Bursts aren't contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn't be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn't be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in. — Burst Culture
ThiGMOO, by Eugene Byrne (Books 2008, 11)
This is, in effect, a [Singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) story, though a rather gentle, slightly comic one.
The AIs that gain self-awareness and seek to achieve independence and change the world, start out as part of an educational project called the Museum of the Mind. In this construct there are a number of simulations of figures from history (mostly fictional, like the victorian prostitute). School pupils, students, researchers and others can interrogate them about life in their time.
It’s interesting that Byrne has them start to gain self-awareness after their systems get infected with a religious program: a virus that tries to ‘convert’ them to Mormonism. I don’t know whether Byrne is trying to tell us that religion is necessary for self-awareness, or if it just seems like a useful trigger to give the programs some extra input and start them asking questions.
Anyway, one of the erams, as they are called (electronic recreation of a mindstate) is based on an early-20th-century socialist activist. Shocked at the apparent absence of socialism in the world he sees outside the computer networks, he organises his fellow erams, and sets out to change the world (and protect their very existence along the way). The title stands for “This Great Movement Of Ours”, which was once a common phrase in speeches by Labour activists, apparently.
It’s good fun, if lightweight. It was published in 1999; I wonder what’s happened to Eugene Byrne since then?
Corporal punishment: not on my watch
There was an arse on the ??Today?? programme this morning, calling for the return of corporal punishment to schools. One in five teachers, he says, want it 'as an option'.
Two points, then: a) that means four in five don’t want it, and b) why do you think it’s all right to use violence against children? (and as a corollary, how do you think doing so will make them less prone to using violence themselves?)
I phone, you phone
So, I've got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a £30-a-month contract.
The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.
iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.
Don’t get me wrong: it does its thing well, from playing music, through purchases, to synchronisation. But my god, it looks ugly.
And nor do I like the way it presents the music it knows about; but then, I’ve never seen an application that does that very well.
As to typing with the on-screen keyboard, well, it’s actually not that bad; it’s never going to. Be fast, bit there are some smart optimisations, like automatically switching back from the symbol keyboard to the letter one when you hit space after a comma, or immediately after you type an apostrophe.
And I almost cry with happiness every time I see the transition from one app to another.
ETA: As you can see from the typoes above, I wrote that on the shiny device. I’ll leave them in for posterity.
Mad bampot on a rope
Went to see Man on Wire last night, the documentary about Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's a great film. I was a bit worried that it would be kind of dull, since we already knew the story. But it's paced like a thriller, complete with starting near the climax and then flashing back to fill in the back story.
I did have a few moments of gut-wrenching horror (I’m not good with ridiculous heights, even when it’s just images of other people experiencing them), but overall found it absolutely amazing, and touching. Great music, too.
There was a poignant moment when they showed documentary footage of the construction of the twin towers. Seeing pre-formed steel sections being lifted into place; sections that I last saw white-hot and crashing to the ground.
Exciting times
These are exciting times in Hackney. Not only has my son just started secondary school today (where did those eleven years go?) but it seems that we are getting a new bookshop near the top of our road.
This is big news indeed. Our little corner of Lower Clapton is characterised more by chicken-based fast-food joints and kebab shops. A children’s bookshop opened on nearby Chatsworth Road a year or two ago (my daughter was their first customer). There was a brief, exciting moment last year when something that looked like a bookshop opened up on Lower Clapton Road, but it turned out to be a religious booksop, specialising the the Christian field.
But today I went up to get my hair cut, and I noticed a new sign up: Pages of Hackney. A new bookshop on the Lower Clapton Road, opening on Saturday 13th September. Excellent news.
Not so good is that Saf’s Barbers is “closed until further notice”. I hope everything’s all right. I still have shaggy hair, which never looks good when it’s receding.
Watermelon Sculpture
A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket (Books, 2008, 10)
This is actually thirteen books, not just one. I've been reading it with my son over a period of several months. He, of course, had already read it, but we like reading together, and I was keen to know the rest of the story, after seeing the film (which is based on the events of the first three books).
Anyway, we finally got to the end, and, while I enjoyed it, I think that Mr Snicket has the not uncommon problem of difficulty with endings.
Or maybe not: he left lots (and lots, and lots) of loose ends flying. But that might be deliberate, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But he seeds so many clues and events throughout the first twelve books that, starting the thirteenth, you wonder how he’s going to bring them all together, and then - he just doesn’t.
Part of the narrative concerns the fact that stories don’t really have starts and finishes, and that a relatively inconsequential moment in your life could be the start or end of someone else’s story, and so on. All very well, but I get the sense that he rather tacked that on to excuse the lack of an ending.
That said, it’s a great story if you’re reading to kids who love language (or if you’re reading it yourself and do); though some, I’m sure, would get annoyed with his repeated “… which is a phrase which here means…” riff, or some of his other running gags. Me, I loved it.
Most importantly, the three Baudelaire orphans are engaging characters: smart, kind, wise (and noble enough) children, caught up in a world of sadness and madness, where almost all the adults who aren’t out to get them are too stupid to help them.
Adults don’t come out of A Series of Unfortunate Events at all well, in fact. Those that aren’t stupid are evil. Those that are neither tend to end up dead, or disappeared. And everyone gets betrayed, and their hearts broken.
Am I telling too much, here? Probably not: Lemony warns us, right from the blurb on The Bad Beginning: if you’re looking for a happy tale, there are plenty of others on the shelves.
While Mr Snicket tries to discourage reading these terrible books at every turn, though, they come highly recommended by me.
The London cabbie: good and bad
We experienced the best and worst of the London cabbie last night: from not taking a fare because to do so would have been a rip-off, to attempted murder.
We were going to an exhibition opening, and had got off the bus wildly too early. We were walking in the right direction, but weren’t quite sure where the gallery was, and we were running late. So we flagged down a passing cab and asked for the street. “It’s just over there,” he said, pointing, “Don’t waste your money.”
It was, indeed, just over there. Admirable behaviour, I thought, as he could easily have made a few quid taking us there.
After we left and were walking to the bus stop, there was an altercation between a cab driver and a cyclist. I didn’t see how it started, but there was shouting and gesticulation, and the cabbie started to get out of his cab.
The cyclist headed off up the road, and suddenly the cabbie roared off after him. It looked like nothing less than an attempt to run the cyclist down.
I guess the cabbie came to his senses, because I don’t think he actually hit the guy. The cyclist very sensibly got off the road and cycled down the pavement in the opposite direction. The cab zoomed off up the road, to fast and too far away for me to get its number, unfortunately. I had my phone out ready to call the cops.
The cyclist seemed to be OK, physically at least. We saw him back on the road and heading in the direction he had been going. It’s scary to think, though, that you could either be that cyclist, or get into that guy’s cab.
What's that stand for?
I remember several years ago when the right answer to this was given wrong on University Challenge; but you’d think that, after all this time, The Guardian’s Technology section would know what URL stands for.
Tip: it’s uniform, not universal.
FF3 on Linux
Well, "that business with installing Firefox 3 on Linux":http://devilgate.org/blog/2008/06/20/it-is-_immensely_-annoying-that-you-can/? Finally done on my Eee PC. Took ages, but the instructions worked more-or-less perfectly.
The Gun Club
I just listened to The Gun Club's first album, Fire Of Love. They're a band that I heard of all through my student years - at least one good friend was a fan - but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now. It's a scorchingly good album, and I'd recommend anyone who likes either punk or blues (and let's face it, who doesn't?) to download it from Emusic forthwith.
It is _immensely_ annoying that you can't just download and install Firefox 3 on Linux (at least the Xandros distro that comes with the Eee PC) without having to install something called Gtk+ 2.10. Not least because you can't just `apt-get install` the latter: you _have_ to build it from source, and handle countless dependencies. Really, I thought we were supposed to have got past all that shit.
This page details the steps.
A Dream of Wessex, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 9)
This is the motherlode of all brains-in-jars/life-is-a-computer-simulation-type stories. Gibson's and the Wachowskis' Matrixes can both trace their origins back to here - or at least, they should be able to. I'm not aware of anything older than this that quite deals with this idea.
At Maiden Castle in Dorchester in the near future (of the time the book was written; it’s now our near past) a scientific research project has been under way for several years. It involves ‘projection’, in which the particpants, their bodies unconscious, enter into a shared, simulated fantasy world. This consensus hallucination was intended to examine a possible future, with a view to suggesting answers to some of the problems of today.
But one of the participants has been stuck in the projection for two years (when the normal period is measured in weeks or a few months at the most); the trustees are getting worried about the costs; and a new participant is about to arrive and change everything.
It is excellent, and (of course) leaves you wondering how many levels of fantasy there are to reality - both the book’s, and ours.
Water on Mars
Phoenix has "found water on Mars":[phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/,](http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/,) by the way.