March 2009
19 posts
A Woman A Man Walked By (again)
Just after putting up the link to the video I got an email from Amazon kindly letting me know that they’d dispatched a copy of the album to me and, sure enough, on Saturday morning it slipped through my letter box.
To say I was looking forward to listening to it is something of an understatement. When Polly announced a few years ago that she was going to stop touring, I took it to mean that...
WatchThis is the video to Black Hearted Love, the first single to be released from the new album being given to us by PJ Harvey and John Parish in the next few days. I love the beginning of the video, travelling through the trees towards the bouncy-castle, and the slow-motion works quite nicely. As is to be expected the song is lovely, quite different from White Chalk’s piano-dominated sounds,...
NIN/JA →
Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction (and Street Sweeper…Ninja Street Sweepers works, not sure why they got left out of the cool tour name) have put an EP online to download in exchange for an email address.
Treme →
The show, which takes its name from a culturally rich black neighbourhood of the city, will focus on New Orleans’s musical community in a smaller and more intimate story than that told throughout The Wire. Set months after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the show will explore how the city’s musicians try to rebuild their lives.
The Guardian’s TV & Radio blog has...
Swissmiss at PKNY →
The talk Tina Roth Eisenberg gave at last night’s Pecha Kucha was videoed and it does a pretty good job of explaining what her blog is all about and how it came to be.
Pecha Kucha is a simple idea but intrigues me immensely. In Japanese it means “the sound of conversation” and involves a group of people listening to around a dozen others who each present 20 slides each for 20...
beghilos →
Hip hop slang applications include the sequence 3722145 which spells “SHIZZLE”.
From Wikipedia’s entry on Calculator Spelling, also known as “beghilos”, the alphabet of letters producable from the upside-down numbers.
(via)
How £1,000 headphones are made →
CNet takes a tour of the Sennheiser factory, where they’re hand-making the new HD800 headphones that will sell for £1000.
The Untold Story →
Across town, the Diamond District was deserted. Notarbartolo drove his rented gray Peugeot 307 past the city’s soot-covered central train station and turned onto Pelikaanstraat, a road that skirted the district. He pulled to the curb, and the Monster, the Genius, the King of Keys, and Speedy stepped out carrying large duffel bags. The King of Keys picked the lock on a run-down office...
Two new Bolaño novels →
Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death. The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer, reported La Vanguardia. The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño’s epic five-part novel 2666.
More news...
PJ Harvey & John Parish interview →
The Quietus has an interview, taken from The Stool Pigeon, with PJ Harvey and John Parish in which they tell the story of how they met and why they continue to work together. I’m looking forward to their new joint album, A Woman A Man Walked By (out March 30th), so so much.
(The full article is up here, but it’s horrible to read. I can’t understand why they’d do that?)
The Unfinished
Last week’s New Yorker had two pieces relating to the author David Foster Wallace who died at the end of last year. Firstly there was, what I considered to be, a really well-written profile on his life and works that while a little difficult to read (he hanged himself after years of depression, it was never going to be a happy read) gave a good insight into the life of someone who, before...
Ants
For my final-year Computer Science project I wrote a simulation program that attempted to demonstrate some of the incredible social behaviour exhibited by ant colonies. As part of the write-up, I did a lot of background reading, far more than I needed to, because there was so much interesting writing around the subject. One of the books that I read from start to finish (and ended up quoting only...
WatchThis is the video to Animal Collective’s My Girls, from their latest album Merriweather Post Pavilion and it’s quite lovely. As I was wandering around the record shop yesterday the packaging for this caught my attention, and I bought it. I’d seen the cover, with it’s hypnotic pattern, but hadn’t realised it was a fold-out card sleeve with another wrapper inside. Also...
Translating The Economist →
While researching Oscar screeners last month, I stumbled on a remarkable example of online collaboration in China that’s completely undiscovered here. In short, a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese...
home of fine hypertext products →
The Rumpus interviews Jason Kottke about the running of his site. On the issue of giving it up:
The major turning point came back in 2004. The site was becoming unmanageable as just a hobby— I was spending 20-30 hours a week on it in addition to working a full-time job — and was more fun/challenging than what I was doing at work, so I decided I either needed to quit the site or turn it into...
No One Left to Press the Police →
David Simon writing on the lack of accountability of police officers who shoot people.