Villagers, and Mick in my Village

Music

I downloaded 'Becoming a jackal' by Villagers and have been listening to it quite a bit this week.  I have heard quite a lot of talk about this band (or rather, this guy, Conor J. O'Brien - see Wikipedia article here) but hadn't heard a specific song I actually identified with them until this week, whern I heard and loved 'That day' on the radio on the way to work.  It was really one of those moments where you almost hold your breath after the song ends, begging the DJ to tell you who it was rather than cutting to an ad break or something equivalently cruel, which at least this time he did not (thanks Ian Dempsey of Today FM!).   The album is very good, and having read some on-line reviews the label of 'the Irish Bright Eyes' seems very fitting, in a very positive way (but not as whingey as the other Conor, i.e., Oberst, can get).  It also reminds me of the melodic theatricality of Duke Special on occasion, and for a one-man act the instrumentation is very good, in particular the drumming/percussion on several tracks.  My pick of the tracks so far include 'Home', 'Ship of promises' and 'Twenty-seven strangers', while 'The pact' is peculiarly 60s-feeling, and the pick is the aforementioned 'That day', the video for which can be seen below:

I also got sent a really nice clip of Josh Ritter and his band getting surprised at an American gig during 'Lantern' by a spot of on-target audience participation, and the looks on the band's faces just says all you need to know about how damn nice and sincere these guys, and their fans, are:

Last week, and previously, I have lamented by inability to get to see The National, despite my quite scary obsession with them and ongoing campaign to bribg their wonderfulness to anyone who will listen.  I have of course looked for clips of them playing at Electric Picnic, but the quality is generally not great (and occasionally depressing, such as clips which seem to show Matt in a state of advanced drunkenness), but I will include a clip of 'Mistaken for strangers' here:

Lastly, but not leastly, I have prevously reviewed here several gigs by Cork hero Mick Flannery (see here and here), and he has been gradually holding gigs closer and closer to my house, clearly in response, and on Friday night he played upstairs in my local pub, The White Horse, a mere 5 mins walk away (the only closer gig was when Mark Eitzel played a solo gig in a pub across the road from where I lived in 1998 or so).  The concert was, as always, far more enjoyable than Mick would have you believe it should be, and I took the opportunity to try the filming capabilities of my new iPhone 4.0, as showcased below for 'California':

Video quality is good, allowing for relatively good indoor light conditions, and I love the ease with which I could upload the clip straight to Youtube from the iPhone.  A clip of 'When I've got a dollar' (not quite the same without the accompaniment of his auntie Yvonne) is below:

That's enough music for now.  I have downloaded new stuff by Mogwai and Interpol, to band I have singularly failed in the past to really get in to (the former through never actually getting their stuff, to be honest) so am going to work on those and report next time.
Other cultural adventures

As I have quite a few videos above, I will keep the rest of this post short and sweet.  I went to see the Cork 'Star Wars invasion' show with my boys (10 and 4) and they thought it was pretty cool; well, to be honest, so did I.  Well put together and packed with enough to keep the many nerds visiting (myself included) happy, with lots of models (no, not that sort, large AT-STs, Y-wings and so on), cool light shows and even some of the actors for photos and chat.  The main draw was obviously Kenny Baker (R2-D2), and it was nice to see the guy who played Boba Fett, and the techie guy who apparently did the voice of General Grevious and others was funny and interesting in on-stage chat, but the other two ex-imperial officers were not exactly Harrison Ford-level novelty.  Anyway, quite well done and worth a look.

On TV, I watched 'The reader', of which it may be faint damnation to say it wasn't as bad as 'The soloist', and I actually found it more watchable and gripping than expected; I think it said something for my level of engagement, however, that I did not actually realise the 'affair' scenes happened after, and not before, the war - I could not work out the chronology, perhaps not surprisingly.    On Kindle, I pre-purchased and was sent 'The fall', which I am just starting (have a few books on the go now) as I really enjoyed 'The strain' (see here) - review to follow.

Tech-wise, I have just got an iPad, of which much more to follow, and my (iPhone) app of the week (and favourite in ages) is called My Artist, and when activated brings up a whole of of information about any artist in your collection, such as Wikipedia articles, Youtube clips and more - excellent for browsing while listening!

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Typo eradication, National frustration and more

It has been a while since I have updated things here, and work pressures seem to keep me distracted in the long evenings which were made for blogging, but I am planning and resolute to get back on track from here. Anyway, gives me lots to catch up on.

Music

I am actually remarkably surprised to note that the best album I have got in the last few weeks has been The Drums’ eponymous one. I was interested enough by their iTunes live EP to chance this and it sounds completely different to the live band, with the vocal histrionics considerably toned down and the backing being the closest I have heard to genuinely capturing early 1980s sound, in particular that of very young Depeche Mode. ‘Down by the river’ is my favourite (although it sounds like ‘The trees’-era Pulp), followed by ‘Book of stories’, ‘Forever and ever amen’, ‘It will all end in tears’ and the bonus track ‘When I come home’. They do look remarkably silly, but they sound quite lovely, although the singles ('Best friend' and 'Let's go surfing' are my least favourite on the album).  I read somewhere that they are the least American (i.e., most English) American band ever, which I completely agree with.  The embrace anglopilia of the most extreme kind, but how bad!

I found a live clip of them doing 'Down by the water' at:



and a clip of 'It will all end in tears' at:

I also found another emphatic argument for why some albums simply cannot be downloaded (as I discussed before here) in ‘Crooked’ by Kristen Hersh, which I got as a book of lyrics and essays which contained a web-link at which you had to enter a password extracted in parts from different sections of said book, whereupon one got to download the tracks. Whatever the quality of the music, and I must admit I haven’t listened to it much yet, the concept is just great and is exactly the way for artists to keep people interested in the physical artefact.

I failed to get tickets for Electric Picnic (turned out the family tickets were actually quite rare and long sold-out) but have got tickets for Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend (which, put together, sounds like the strap-line of a good B-movie horror, like the ‘Dawn of the dead’ remake from 2004) in Dublin in December.

The National released tickets for a trio of Dublin gigs the same weekend (what a weekend!) at 9.00 Friday but they were gone by the time we tried to book an hour later to my incredible frustration, so we will have to see if I have missed the chance to catch them once again, this time under circumstances where I wouldn’t even have had to sleep in a tent for 3 nights for the privilege. I found an interview with Matt and Aaron at Electric Picnic at:



Movies

Not a whole lot to report here, although I did see ‘The last exorcism’. I actually started that evening fully planning to go to ‘The girl who played with fire’ and changed my mind about an hour beforehand when I read very good reviews of the former. Interestingly, that was the same day I very gladly welcomed Mark Kermode back to his podcast after what felt like an unfairly extended summer break, and listened to his podcast on the way to the movie, and the last thing I heard before entering the cinema was him blasting the ending of the film. I can honestly not speculate to what extent my reaction to the movie was shaped by this critical (literally) intervention but I suspect it was fairly formative. Anyway, I thought the film was good, less frightening than I expected from the reviews (I found ‘Paranormal activity’ far creepier) and yes the ending was as far off the wall as a misshapen demonic coathanger, and I can honestly not speculate on what exactly was shown or intended. On a minor point, while a key plot point seemed to revolve around a word the possessed girl used during her second exorcism, I focussed on a whole different word (‘involuntary’) which for some reason I could not see someone of her background using casually. Anyway, it that is what you dwell on afterwards, not really a great sign of the terror factor. I actually found a clip on Youtube called ‘Scary car’ (here) far more unsettling when discovered accidentally.

On DVD, I found ‘Cemetery junction’ really nice and funny (especially the muppetish cafe owner, while the final line as they board the train is just wonderful) and just genuinely sweet (kept reminding me of ‘Gregory’s girl’, which is as high praise as I can give), and would thoroughly recommend it. On the other hand, ‘The soloist’ sank so low it’s unwatchable (sorry), and made me re-evaluate my conviction that any movie with Robert Downey Jr in it couldn’t be all bad.

Books

I finished the Millenium trilogy almost without pause for breath (I think that was one thing which helped deblog my evenings); in fact, the second and third books are effectively contiguous so the pause was clearly more intended by the publishers than the late author. I did enjoy the books and found the epic sweep of characters and investigations more than outweighed the occasional silliness (Salander may have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem! And then forgot when she got shot in the head!). I think I had enough by the end, and while I bought the first movie from iTunes (you know, because you can) I have yet to watch it, principally because the cables I bought off eBay to connect the iPhone to my TV don’t bloody work.

I then changed direction pretty abruptly to read ‘The great typo hunt’ by Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, about one guy and some like-minded co-conspirators on a road trip around the US, fixing typos on public and commercial signage, sometimes by stealth, sometimes in partnership with the custodians of the relevant establishments. As an unabashed grammatical pedant myself, these guys are so much after my own heart that it makes me a little scared they might creep in some night and carve it out with a sharpened marker or other tool from Jeff’s typo-fixing armoury. I just loved this book, and identified with every point and principle and moment of madness, and think it blended real profound discussion of the nature of language and current standards of usage thereof with good humour, great eye for anecdote and the absurd and just a wonderful spirit. I was quite shocked when the later stages of the book took an unexpected twist into darker territory as they are charged with defacement of a national monument due to some unauthorised improvement of a sign at the Grand Canyon; that is honestly suffering for what you believe in.

The blog of the Typo Eradication Advancement League is here and I found a video trailer for the book at:



These guys deserve your support in their fight for all that is right about the English language, so give it to them.  My own favourite typo (which I inexplicably and unforgiveably omitted to obtain photographic evidence of) was a large sign at the end of my road proclaiming the source of funding for the Cork to Kerry fibre-optic broadband whatever as follows (presented in very large letters on a very large board exactly as shown below):

Project part sponsored by
by the European Union

Does no-one check these things???  In other favourites of mine, I honestly don't know if the author of the sign in the following picture (from an Irish teachers' conference) was being ironic or not:

and the newspaper headline below still amazes me every time:

Now, I am waiting for Kindle delivery of my pre-ordered copy of ‘The fall’, the sequel to ‘The strain’ by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, which I thoroughly enjoyed earlier this year (see review here), and in the meantime have changed direction once again with ‘Unseen academicals’, the first Terry Pratchett book I have read in ages.

On other fronts, the iPhone is needless to say simply amazing, and every day I discover new things to do with it (a garden family camping experiment was enlivened and facilitated by the discovery of a torch app! Quickoffice has made it really into a useful work mini-computer). I am also experimenting with iDisk to share files and stream movies rather than using memory on the device, but the high cost of subscription annoys me and I am not sure if I will pay when my 60-day free trial is up. Games-wise, I have explored a few new interesting apps like ‘The battle for Hoth’ and ‘Dungeon hunter’ which give me RTS and D&D analogues, respectively, and I have got some minor fun from each. Battery life still a pain in the arse, but have stretched a bit due to changes like controlling automatic e-mail fetches and keeping an eye on open apps in multi-tasking. I have significantly slowed in my feverish phase of appquisition, and only minor other niggles persist (can’t get Toodldoo toodle do what I need in terms of syncing with my Outlook tasks like the websites say I should be able to). Anyway, still a hell of a yoke, and the only question that remains is how it took me so long to get it! Click Here to Read More..