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Last 50 mainblog entries:
Friday, 26th of November, 2004Thursday, 25th of November, 2004
Listening Nov 2004 (5:28 pm)
OK, the AudioMulch discussion list currently has a thread on “current fav music CDs”, to which I contributed. I thought it was only fair to post it here, as I haven’t been talking about music lately. Here you go: Tunng – Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs (brilliant forthcoming CD on Static Caravan, drops 15th of Jan. Think the Books with slightly more folk-song arrangements, utter brilliance) The Boats – Songs By The Sea (the two guys from the Remote Viewer (ex-Hood) plus female vocals, lovely hybrid of acoustic sounds and minimal electronics. Strongly recommended, on the Remote Viewer’s own label Moteer and certainly available through Norman Records) Hood – The Lost You EP and promo of Outside Closer album (utter genius as always) Pedro – Fear & Resilience remixes (best track on the excellent Pedro album from last year; the Prefuse 73 remix is his best thing in ages as Prefuse – but check the wondrous Savath & Savalas EP Manana. The Four Tet mix is a bit self-indulgently long but has some great bits…) Her Space Holiday – The Young Machines Remixed (oh, that Matmos remix! Oh! But the Album Leaf is a beauty too, Dntel turns in one of his lovely orchestral-sampling pastiches, and all the mixes are good. On Mush) Kattoo – Places (half of Beefcake, sounds exactly like a Beefcake album, which I’m not complaining about. On Beefcake’s original home, Hymen) Tin Hat Trio – Book of Silk (indescribably wonderful band, gypsy/folk/jazz/improv/C20th classical/tango/bluegrass etc, on Ropeadope – subsite for the album here) Sufjan Stevens – Seven Swans (perfect folk, the Christian lyrics are fitting if not my thing) And just to make it a bit on-topic (for the Mulch list where this was originally posted): In my email I forgot to mention also Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the more famous Sergei, whose String Quartet No. 1 is a rather good work which has been released in a performance by the Elysian Quartet by new label Nonclassical along with a bunch of remixes of the work. Hm, remixed string quartet, what a great idea! *heh* They’re great too, and by far the best remix is Gabriel Prokofiev’s own. Worth tracking down (try those Norman boys again…)
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Thursday, 18th of November, 2004
“Monster Thickburger horror” (7:37 pm)
I don’t know why, but I’m irresistibly amused by this SMH article.
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Momus’s metaphysics pub quiz (11:18 am)
Funny ol’ Momus started a thread over a ILX about metaphysics, with a cute quiz. Go read his rant and quiz. He also posted it in his LiveGerbil. Here are my answers, which admittedly go off the beaten track a little. 1. Do you think that ‘Reality is elsewhere’? 2. Do you think that ‘If my life as I live it was all there is, I’d top myself right now!’? 3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it’s not really where your concerns are? 4. Is your body going to seed because you’re off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world? 5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism? 6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come? 7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them ‘objective’? 8. Do you find yourself using the word ‘timeless’ when you praise things? 9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as ‘all there is’ be like? Better, or worse? Accepting the material world as described to the best of its ability by science as “all there is” is a trickier question. I’ve tried to outline why I don’t think this sort of materialism implies that other sort of materialism, a philosophy of life in which nothing matters other than amassing material wealth. If such a materialist of the latter sort really believed that suffering, love, culture et al didn’t matter because they didn’t exist, why would even material wealth matter? Why would having when others have not matter to them, that is? 10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or ‘god particle’? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?
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Wednesday, 17th of November, 2004
Archives – sorted! (12:04 am)
I can hardly contain myself. After a long long time not being able to work out how to get my category-based archives working properly, I’ve finally sorted it out! I adapted these from Nicer Archives and the various WordPress included php files and suchlike. It took quite a lot of php hacking and I’m rather proud to have finally sorted it out. *phew*
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Thursday, 4th of November, 2004
Oh man oh man oh man oh man (8:44 pm)
Well this morning, at the end of an hour-and-a-quarter-long judgement, Magistrate Ian Barnett dismissed my Dad of the ludicrous attempted murder charge that’s been hanging over our family for some 2 years now. I’ll have to save my distaste for Murdoch’s NEWS empire for another day, because (courtesy, mind you, of APP), all their papers have a really good article about the judgement today. Here’s the one from the main NEWS site: Doctor murder charge dismissed. Edit: Here’s the SMH article, finally… Similarly, it gets a few things wrong but also says a lot of good things.
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Posting tweet... Powered by Twitter Tools. Frogworth Corp, our parent company. Utility Fog, Peter's show on FBi Radio in Sydney. Peter has a LiveGerbil, too! Friend me if you know me, but don't expect many posts there. rss2, rss or atom feeds. Tasty! Via those feeds, Stumblings is syndicated over @ LiveJournal if you want to add it to your friends list - but please come over here to leave comments (I don't check 'em there!) Sidebar all too much? Check out all reviews separately in the: Reading archives | Listening archives Last 5 comments: Blog redesign(s) coming up... 23.04.2009 (08:50 pm) Hahahahaha 23.10.2008 (11:13 am) Testing, testing 23.05.2008 (09:09 pm) Do The Test 26.03.2008 (06:56 pm) Sorry 14.02.2008 (03:23 pm) Jump to: Current/recommended reading Current/recommended listening — bugger all here, but these days you can read some of my reviews at the cyclic defrost blog and in cyclic defrost itself (abridged, with free typos/grammatical mistakes added!)... Recently played tracks (via last.fm) Other weblogs of note: angelog poison to the mind the null device virulent memes (which is no more) the lexicon, for the lovely lexi's lexcellent & lexstatic, um, music reviews :) charlie stross's diary chris lawson et al's talking squid Roger Langridge's hotel fred crooked timber greensblog larvatus prodeo (etc) My Amazon.co.uk wishlist Peter's recently played tracks (via last.fm)
Reading:Note, my earlier book reviews, and this applies somewhat to the music reviews too, were formatted as a long stream of commentary, and thus need a lot of rewriting to fit into separate entries. So there are very few previous book review entries as yet. For now check the static Reviews Archive for a bunch of earlier reviews. Grimwood, Jon Courtenay – Stamping Butterflies (Saturday, 6th of November, 2004, 11:17 pm) Hoo boy, it’s been a long time since I read this one. I knew at the time that I should’ve written the article right then, but I wasn’t allowed to publish the review yet, so I left it. Jon Courtenay Grimwood started off writing ultra-dark and violent cyberpunk in a series that culminated with redRobe and reMix (briefly reviewed here). He really began to turn into an Important Writer, though, with the Arabesk series (review of the final one here), and a large portion of Stamping Butterflies shares their North African setting. However, Stamping Butterflies is really a different beast altogether from his earlier works, and ought by rights to elevate him to, let’s say, Really Important Writer status. It’s a tour de force, albeit not quite perfect. In the Arabesks, each novel’s main strand was complemented by a an italicised flashback strand, which slowly revealed important information relevant to the main strand. Stamping Butterflies is made up of at least five separate strands, some sharing characters, each set at different times, and there’s a puzzle regarding whether they’re even each in the same alternate history or not. For Stamping Butterflies isn’t so much an alternate history as a very strange commentary on alternate histories, asking (if never quite explaining) how the future could affect the past. Grimwood’s major talent for me is in character and setting, and it’s impressively on show here. There’s a beautifully affecting story about the only two punk kids in 1970’s Marrakech, living their lives in poverty and oppression. Jake Razor, English punk rocker, and Celia, manager of his band Razor’s Edge, come to Marrakech and perhaps precipitate, or perhaps just stumble into, a chain of events that turns their lives upside-down. It’s exciting reading Grimwood doing revisionist near-hard-sf space opera, but what fuels the novel is the beautifully empathetic characterisation. Each of the above characters are drawn with sympathy – indeed, only a few true villains are not given some viewpoint time. So what of the overarching conceit – that the future and the past are linked, and the dreams of a sad, lonely Emperor in his Forbidden City on a mysterious artefact somewhere in outer space can change the future? I’m just not sure. I thought I was reading quite carefully, but I didn’t quite end up working out what happened. The thing is, I just couldn’t quite work out whether all other the strands of the book were in the past of the future strand, or around the corner in the next universe along. Where, in other words, is the point where the past changes? Near the end, Grimwood plays a strange trick. The two young punk kids in Marrakech have a touching love story that ends in heartbreaking tragedy due to the political and historical pressures that Grimwood is so deft with. But in the last chapter, we see them again, walking off hand in hand. It’s a bittersweet scene that sums up Grimwood’s genius, and you’ll have to read the book in order to see what he’s doing. As an epilogue, I can’t conclude this review without a reference to M John Harrison’s Light. Gollancz have chosen to mark each strand with a small icon at the top of each chapter, similarly to Light. Harrison’s novel also loops back from future to past, although Light is a closed loop. But I feel there are more parallels to be drawn between these two novels, and I do feel that Grimwood’s novel is entirely deserving of being juxtaposed with that recent masterpiece. Both books hinge on their characterisation and setting, and both use just enough cutting-edge science to make them more Al Reynolds than [insert-non-hard-sf-writer-here].
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Listening:Listening Nov 2004 (Thursday, 25th of November, 2004, 5:28 pm) OK, the AudioMulch discussion list currently has a thread on “current fav music CDs”, to which I contributed. I thought it was only fair to post it here, as I haven’t been talking about music lately. Here you go: Tunng – Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs (brilliant forthcoming CD on Static Caravan, drops 15th of Jan. Think the Books with slightly more folk-song arrangements, utter brilliance) The Boats – Songs By The Sea (the two guys from the Remote Viewer (ex-Hood) plus female vocals, lovely hybrid of acoustic sounds and minimal electronics. Strongly recommended, on the Remote Viewer’s own label Moteer and certainly available through Norman Records) Hood – The Lost You EP and promo of Outside Closer album (utter genius as always) Pedro – Fear & Resilience remixes (best track on the excellent Pedro album from last year; the Prefuse 73 remix is his best thing in ages as Prefuse – but check the wondrous Savath & Savalas EP Manana. The Four Tet mix is a bit self-indulgently long but has some great bits…) Her Space Holiday – The Young Machines Remixed (oh, that Matmos remix! Oh! But the Album Leaf is a beauty too, Dntel turns in one of his lovely orchestral-sampling pastiches, and all the mixes are good. On Mush) Kattoo – Places (half of Beefcake, sounds exactly like a Beefcake album, which I’m not complaining about. On Beefcake’s original home, Hymen) Tin Hat Trio – Book of Silk (indescribably wonderful band, gypsy/folk/jazz/improv/C20th classical/tango/bluegrass etc, on Ropeadope – subsite for the album here) Sufjan Stevens – Seven Swans (perfect folk, the Christian lyrics are fitting if not my thing) And just to make it a bit on-topic (for the Mulch list where this was originally posted): In my email I forgot to mention also Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the more famous Sergei, whose String Quartet No. 1 is a rather good work which has been released in a performance by the Elysian Quartet by new label Nonclassical along with a bunch of remixes of the work. Hm, remixed string quartet, what a great idea! *heh* They’re great too, and by far the best remix is Gabriel Prokofiev’s own. Worth tracking down (try those Norman boys again…)
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