Category Archives: Entertainment

Musical Clicktrances

Posted on 2010-01-05 by pappp

I’ve spent a disgusting fraction of my winter break embarking on various clicktrances, in to all manner of vaguely embarrassing and totally useless topics (The Elder Scrolls Lore? Rimfire Rifles? The hunt for new Electropop?). I’d really love to know the etymology for “Clicktrance;” it gets used on BoingBoing frequently, but I’m not sure if that is where it was coined. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, a clicktrance is a common (and my favorite) term for the situation where one finds something marginally interesting/attractive/etc. online, and, hours later, discovers they’ve been intently link following from it. The phenomenon still always makes me think of the Eugen Roth quote I posed a while ago while griping about Distractability.

As for the last clicktrance topic, lately I’ve been noticing the only way to actually find interesting music on the Internet is by finding some weird little scene and browsing in it. The last round of unusual finds I listen to consistently (A Kiss Could Be Deadly, Electric Valentine, Hyper Crush) are all out of the same Southern California scene that I stumbled upon via Pandora, then clicktranced through their mutual linking. Another more recent (for me) example of the phenomenon: earlier in the break I found my way into a link cluster for some British pop starting (Warning: The following links may consume hours of your life)here, and here. Most of what turned up ranged from unremarkable to truly awful, but had a few gems. These include
Ellie Goulding – A pretty good, synth-dressed version of the “Girl and a Guitar” archetype.
Little Boots – Imagine if the “Girl and a Piano/Guitar” archetype were translated to “Girl and a bunch of bitchin’ synthesizer gear” in the best way possible.
Example – His older pure storytelling hip hop is terrible, but he has found quality pop hooks, and produced the following two tracks, which are pretty amazing. Apparently there is a whole album like that coming, and I will obtain it on first opportunity.
Loebeat – Noise meets Pop, it’s truly something different. The “Dicey $Verbs” videos are fascinating, basically ambient/noise with storytelling value. The player on their website includes direct links to the MP3s so you can make it portable for when the odd sounds haunt you hours later.

Later in the same foray, I got off the British common thread and found a couple other winners. The pick of that batch was from the always exciting electronic, girly, and morose vein: Fan Death, who are probably named for the very, very weird Korean superstition. They only have a handful of tracks available (including creepy-awesome videos for 3 of them), but they are all excellent, and there is supposedly an album coming. Also, the leads’ names are captivatingly ridiculous: Dandelion Wind Opaine, who is apparently a fixture in the Vancouver techno scene (?) and Marta Jaciubek-McKeever.

In general, I’m so pleased the Kid + Pop Sensibilities + Synthesizer = Electropop/Synthpop genre is being legitimized by acts like Owl City. His current tour mate, Lights, is pretty fun as well, but a little too saccharine for my tastes.

All the links in this post should be copyright-legit; it would be irresponsible to just link easily available torrents for everything with a published album…which is irritatingly only about half of the bands listed.

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Dorkbotlex #9

Posted on 2009-12-21 by pappp

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After missing a few due to travel and other obligations, I’m back to attending DorkbotLex. #9 was last Saturday (the 19th) and, as is traditional, I’ve posted up some pictures on flickr. This month’s presentations were both electronic music projects, one set of hardware hacks and one piece of prototype software. As always, very cool, and a great source of energy for creative endeavors.

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Cruel Intentions

Posted on 2009-12-19 by pappp

Cruel Intentions is, after Hackers, probably my favorite shitty movie. I ran across some stills (not there, but that is a good example) online a while ago, remembered how awesome it is (look at the still, you’ll understand), and had to track a copy down. Ernest Hardy of the LA Weekly’s review “In truth, the only reason this film was made was to allow viewers to ogle pretty young things behaving badly.” pretty much sums the whole thing up. I’m reasonably certain that review was intended as criticism, but that is totally missing the point. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon and Selma Blair while they were young and cute in leading roles, and I’m told Ryan Phillippe is there as eye candy as well, but thats not my thing.

It’s apparently one of several movies based off a French novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, but the terrible writing, terrible acting, and implausible teenage east coast upper crust setting annihilate any sense of class that might imply. The plot is fun and honestly sort of cute, but you could watch it with the sound off and it would probably seem like a better movie. The problem with the “sound off” approach is that you would miss out on the angsty 14-year-old fanfic grade writing and shitty wooden delivery that elevate it from “attractive but dumb” to “attractive and hilarious“. Turning the sound off also wouldn’t save you from the glaring plot holes: how did the journal get wrapped? Why does he still have it in some scenes after passing it off, and most importantly HOW DID SHE GET HIS DAMN CAR at the end, did she go through her dying lover’s pockets?

Also, I love Sebastian’s style. His black duster-thing is the shit, and I want his half-frame glasses… the sunglasses (Vuarnet PX 3000 Wayfarer or knockoff thereof) are a plot element, so they are easy to look up, but I can’t find (and probably wouldn’t actually want to pay for/wear even if I could) the half frames.

For those familiar with UK’s schedule; this is indeed how I celebrated being done with the semester; some friends, a double of Woodford Reserve, and a movie that underflows it’s way to awesome.

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Nabokov Explains Retro

Posted on 2009-12-11 by pappp

I’ve been working thorugh The Stories of Vladmir Nabokov for a while “in my copious spare time”(which has become something of a catchprhase in my department), and it is expectedly excellent. One particular passage is prominent enough to perscribe posting: in A Guide to Berlin (One of the many “I am such an amazing author that you’re going to love and find meaning in this mundane vignette” style stories in the collection), Nabokov perfectly explains the retro aesthetic:

The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor’s uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything ,every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor’s purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine — everything will be ennobled and justified by its age.
I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dress up for an elegant masquerade.

While on the topic of retro aesthetic, check out Jake Von Slatt’s 2009 Steampunk Gift Guide. David Gingery books and Buffy DVDs, Power Tools and Prissy Bags (although personally I would go for a Torrente if I were to pay too much for a Marcopoloni bag; I just like vertical messengers), truly a man after my own heart.

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Makers

Posted on 2009-11-25 by pappp

I recently finished Cory Doctrow’s new novel, Makers, which I really didn’t have time to read, but between geek book club and starting it on the plane to portland I was compelled. Like his last novel, Little Brother (which is YA fiction, but everyone should read anyway), I read it as an eBook on my n810, which is a bit of an odd reading experience, but one that is growing on me (No additional mass/volume per book! Searchable! Ever-Present! Until the damn battery runs out or it breaks!)
It is a pretty fun read, but I must say I liked the first two “lighter” sections better than the third. Some observations:

* Kettlewell seems to be largely borrowed, without the transparently symbolic name, from Willam Gibson’s character Hubertus Bigend

* Suzanne Church strikes me as a sort of composite of the notable female Internet-People, particularly Ana Marie Cox but Xeni Jardin also come to mind. I also wonder if the name isn’t a slight homage to Susan Kare, who is responsible for a starting portion of the art for early iconic computer interface elements (this is a stretch, but only a little). A little googling shows there is also a fairly appropriate real Suzanne Church, which must be a little confusing right now.

* The tech in the story is not embarrassingly wrong; its all plausible and sound except for some fanciful detours near the end. This does not normally happen when engineers read fiction, so good job Cory.

* Cory has clever ideas to try, and the hackers are damn well going to implement them. I suspect many of the things that seem clever in the book (RFID tagging all your crap to make it searchable, for example) won’t actually pan out if implemented, but I’m onboard with other things, especially the mechanical-computers-as-art hobby one of the main characters engages in.

Overall, a fun light read, worth the couple hours it takes to get through. Surprisingly, I think someone who isn’t well-versed in the workings of electronics could read the whole thing without missing much, which is remarkable considering how much fun can be had by those of us who are by working out the minutia of how the nifty plot device gadgets would actually work.

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Lady GaGa: Transhumanist Icon?

Posted on 2009-11-22 by pappp

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Looking at an amazing BoingBoing post comparing a recording of Stefani Germanotta (Lady GaGa before she became Lady GaGa) playing at a NYU talent show in 2005 and the official video for Bad Romance that recently became available really shows the degree to which one can radically, radically alter themselves with the help of modern technology.
Go watch and have your mind blown.
I suggest reading some of the comments as well, some of the thoughts there are interesting.
Basically, the question is how one goes from the stereotypical “Cute little brunette girl and a piano” performance (most people are comparing to Norah Jones, that recording in particular strikes me as more similar to Sara Bareilles, but listening to Red and Blue definitely brings out the Norah Jones sound), to the absolutely over-the-top haute fashion/burlesque/modern art look and electropop sound everyone knows in less than four years. I happen to be in the tiny demographic that enjoys both, which makes it great fun to look at the connections.

In the 2005 video, she has a normal, albeit impressively powerful and well trained, human voice. In the 2009 video her voice is autotuned, layered, sampled, and distorted into things no human could produce directly. In the 2005 video the instrumentation is easily recognizable piano work. In the 2009 video, most of the instrumentation doesn’t even strongly suggest what sort of physical instrument it might be modeled after. Likewise, in the 2005 video, she looks like a cute little Italian girl in a green dress. In the 2009 video, she changes hair colors, hair textures, (apparent) skin tones, and bizarre illusion-inducing makeup jobs, and runs through a collection of costumes that look like they belong in a creepy scifi movie (5th element-esque strappy outfit? – check. Translucent medical gown – check. Flamethrower bra – WTF? – check.). All this stuff is really pretty cool technical accomplishments, from the DSP wizardry that goes into producing pleasing, but entirely unnatural, sounds, to the bizarre chemical manipulations (or just wigs, who knows if she has any hair left after all that) for the hair, to the exotic materials that go into the bizarre outfits (go browse some press pictures, it gets way worse. bubble dress for fuck’s sake), to the careful psychology to make the illusions happen (huge-eye makeup, low sloped ceilings, carefully controlled perspectives, and bunches of little head-trips I’m not even sure how happen). You can call it un-genuine, but this is expressing yourself with the full capabilities afforded by modern technology, irregardless of the fact that it deeply erodes one’s ability to perceive her as human.

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Anti-Convergence

Posted on 2009-11-15 by pappp

I saw a couple of really impressive examples of Anti-Convergence on the trip to Portland, and ran into a couple pretty good arguments for the concept. The best example was the girl in front of me on the long leg of the flight; she was dual wielding an iPod Touch (or iPhone) for games, and some sort of hard drive based music player for music. The strange thing is, I’m sure the experience of each was better than using the touchscreen as a convergence device as I’m sure Apple intended. Touchscreens are still terrible interfaces for music players. I use, and for the most part enjoy, my n810 as a music player, but the inability to use it without taking it out and looking, like I could with the physical interfaces of it’s predecessors, is frequently irritating.
I ran into several good reasons for not using a single device, because I was (so much as I could) doing so. I was, for several hours, using my n810 as a a music player and ebook reader. The combination keeps the onboard DSP and the screen (with backlight) enabled, which drains the battery very much more quickly than either operation (particularly music only) on its own, to such an extent I had to switch to reading a dead tree book or risk killing my entertainment. The thing is, I don’t need more battery (MOAR BATTERY!) very often, just on a rare, almost always premeditated occasion. Maybe those silly little rechargeable external battery pods are actually a good idea.
This hits both issues; the eggs in one basket problem, where having a single converged device leaves a single point of failure (compounded by my tendency to hack on my gadgets), and the battery tech issue, where the ability to power gadgets is significantly lagging other gadget features right now.
I also always run into a pair of problems with cellular convergence devices; the blooducking assholes in the cellular industry, and the potential for breaking my phone. There is a strong tendency to lock down the ability to hack on devices with phones, and the ones they haven’t locked down are extraordinarily expensive. There is a fairly valid argument for the lock-down, as it is a reasonable concern that users (or some black-hat assholes’) actions could disable the cellular functionality, potentially cutting someone off in an emergency.
Maybe one day there will be a magical converged device (perhaps one of these things with a dual-layer epaper+active screen?), that will fit in a pocket and suffice as a web access mechanism, phone, music player, and ebook reader. Until then, I’ll keep eyeballing all the fancy new widgets, and using my collection of (moderately) reliable old ones (and dead tree books) until there is actually an improvement.

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Buildycrunkin’

Posted on 2009-11-06 by pappp

I am currently at Buildycrunken #1:Hocus Focus. It is packed with people and win.

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To clarify, according to the mailing list, Buildycrunkin’ (a verb) is what one does at Buildycrunken (a noun). I suppose that means I am gettin’ buildycrunk? It is very important to establish proper etymology in these situations.

And look! its diverse geeks. Not just the usual computer folks, but knitters and boardgamers and geeks of all kinds (including, you know, girls…)

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ML and Music

Posted on 2009-10-03 by pappp

I’ve been working on figuring out ML for an Advanced Programming Languages assignment. ML is a peculiar language, so it’s been taking some time, and when I’m spending hours staring at blocks of text I tend to get more into music as a complimentary activity. Both are turning up things worth sharing.
ML:
Functional programming has always confused me; as a computer engineer it strikes me as a deeply unnatural thing for the computer to do (what the hell does it look like in memory? — I mostly know and it isn’t pretty), and it isn’t a terribly natural paradigm for humans (although I will grant that is would likely be no more of a contortion for someone not accustomed to programming than any other paradigm). I guess there is a reason the deeply functional stuff tends to be mostly limited to “interesting” languages that are mostly outside the mainstream. I can “feel the power” on a lot of fronts; the ability to completely describe functions as input/output pairs is cool, recursion is natural and easy, and the type system is nifty, but it all still feels a little uncomfortable to me.
Music:
I’ve spent the last couple weeks on a Hyper Crush kick . Pandora brought me Hyper Crush off an A Kiss Could be Deadly derived station a while ago, and it took me a while to make up my mind about them. They make INCREDIBLY catchy, ostentatiously course, and somehow still incredibly geeky techno-influenced hiphop, which is either absolutely brilliant or unforgivably obnoxious. Aside from endless energy and spectacular synthesizer work, their songs are laced with a vast and remorseless collection of samples from and references to bits of pop-culture ephemera from the 1960s onward. Just to name a few, one track begins with a sample from The Shangri-Las “Leader of the Pack”, and another borrows its background from “Crazy Frog”. Both mixtape releases (Both available legitimately free online, but buried behind some flash obstructions) are shot through with samples from West Side Story, The Wizard, Back to the Future, and a wide swath of 80s and 90s video games. It is the pure sound of geeks letting their hair down, and it feels damn good.

To compliment the loud, I started listening to The xx yesterday, which I actually learned about from the music section in the back of last week’s The Week, which is usually too pretentious to pay attention to. Their debut album xx is unbelievably complex and nuanced for a first effort from a group of 20somethings. The lyrics are often male/female harmonies (I like the female vocalist’s voice much better, but thats par for the course with me), which are not necessarily the same words or timing for both voices but remain in harmony none the less. The lyrics are also quite subtle, one could reasonably make it through the entire album without realizing it’s mostly about sex. The coolest thing to me is how much they play with negative space; the crisp gaps are as much a part of the music as the instrumentation itself. There really isn’t any standout track, good or bad, on the album, so just go listen to any random track.

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Barrel #2: Away

Posted on 2009-10-03 by pappp

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The 12-note barrel is away. I’m pretty sure everyone from Collexion involved is well and truly done with this particular stunt, but it was a neat project with some great results. This one went through the School of Music’s benefit gala to benefit the School of Music Service Organization. It only pulled in $750, but with the lower materials cost that still represents some income for the benefiting organization. The picture above is (almost) all the guts for the barrel, before being assembled and installed.

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