totient | Entries tagged with music

Tea, Coffee, or Soda?: I've been reading The Expanse and one of the things I love is how each character's preferred caffeination method is gone into in great depth. It lends some dimensionality to the characters. Plus you know by the end of Avasarala's introductory tea preparation that this is someone who Does Not Fuck Around and indeed, that's really her defining characteristic.

There do not seem to be any soda drinkers. Carbonated water is a by-product of carbon capture from fossil fuel burning power plants, so perhaps it's just not a thing in a fusion powered world.

I am in the middle of book eight and I keep expecting the next schism in the world to be between the coffee drinkers and the tea drinkers. It hasn't happened yet, but every other change in the world seems like it has, so who knows.
Dogs or Cats?: Lately I have observed that 90% of everyone is really just going along with the prevailing winds. The remaining 5% on either side of that will be good when everyone else is evil, or evil when everyone else is good. It's how you get a few good cops in the worst police departments, but also how those departments are so terrible. It's also how some cities can have so many dogs and others so many cats.

Which are the dogs and which are the cats is a matter of opinion.
Can you play an instrument?: This is one of those time traveler meme answers. The problem with going back in time to tell yourself something is it has to be something your younger self would believe. But my younger self, who wanted to play a rock instrument, would totally have listened if someone who looked like my dad came back to tell him that if he picked guitar, his mom would have let him play rock music because she wasn't (then, anyway) fond of classical guitar.
What’s your sun sign?: One of the more fascinating books I own is an extensive treatise on the history of Daylight Savings Time in North America. It's pretty convoluted, as there were decades-long hodgepodges of local approaches between when the idea was dreamed up and when it was standardized. There's an entire chapter just on Indiana.

This book is still in print, because it's used by astrologers to convert times of day on birth certificates from local time to GMT. That's most of the value I've ever gotten from astrology. Not that I have a problem with randomly generated divination as a tool to see what's on someone's mind, like flipping a coin to see if you like the result. But I find that tarot has more material and more options for interpretation, and is more amenable to reinterpretation on the fly.
First song lyrics that pop into your head?: Right now I'm assembling a dance playlist. The rule is it has to be a tune that makes you get up and dance, and every credited artist has to be female. Acts with group names can't have male band members at the time the track was recorded (so for instance, La Roux is only OK after 2012). Individual recording artists are generally fine if that person is female. There can be male dancers or backup singers or session musicians or producers or what have you.

I am taking a fairly broad view of "female" but it does not appear that Harris Milstead used she/her pronouns (nor that he considered that to be a deadname), so I am not putting Divine on this list.

A slightly sticky point is Stock Aitken Waterman productions. I am allowing any of them, but I see why they might be disallowed, or only allowed for tracks like the ones on Donna Summer's Another Place and Time album where the artist was previously famous.

As a result of working on this playlist I've spent a lot of time recently with songs stuck in my head.
Do you have any tattoos?: The person I got this meme from compared tattoos to babies and advanced degrees, all of which she finds fascinating though she has none of her own.

I was once asked in a job interview if I was sure I didn't have a PhD. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed. I can't be quite as certain that there aren't any children I don't know about.
Do you have any hobbies?: Apparently, filling out memes without actually answering them.

I put Laibach's cover of _For You Blue_ into Youtube, amusedly sang along to the lyrics of the original, and then even more amusedly wondered what song Youtube would offer me next.

Answer: Anne Clark, _Our Darkness_.

Well played, Youtube.

Long ago I was a huge Depeche Mode fan. Enough of a fan to go see them at the Forum in LA -- a terrible concert venue, especially for a band that's really not so great in concert -- and enjoy it anyway.

Then I found a whole bunch of other music, and Depeche Mode stopped doing much new work, and they fell out of my rotation, and then into the bin of music I mostly avoided, or was embarrassed about having been a fan of. They pretty much stayed in that bin for most of the last 25 years, even when I was listening to other 80s emo music.

And then Johnny Cash covered Personal Jesus.

There's pretty much no better way to give emo some gravitas than that. Some time has also winnowed out the chaff, as it does for anything really. The illusion of things improving with age -- antiques, art, architecture, maybe even wine -- is just us discarding or using up the worse examples and preserving the better ones. It gets easier and easier to appreciate what's left.

And so I'm back to a bit of pride, when it came up in a random mix, to be able to recognize Strangelove at 0:01 when the first actual note is not until 0:08.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/177114.html

Twice in the last few days I've had conversations in which I wanted to argue that Ariadne auf Naxos was a requiem for classical music, but been unable to remember the name of the opera. So here it is.

88 lines about 44 presidents

The Wikipedia article on Leonard Cohen says of Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man: "It is a film of the 2005 tribute to Leonard Cohen "Came So Far For Beauty" held at the Syndey Opera House". There isn't much else to say about the movie, which isn't a biography, doesn't examine Cohen's considerable influence or influences, isn't a coherent presentation of his work, and for the most part doesn't even feature particularly good performances. The Wikipedia article, on the other hand, is quite fascinating, provided you have someplace at least as well air-conditioned as an art house cinema in which to read it.

Wow, Palm chose the $300 price point for their long-rumored TX instead of the $400 price point.
That makes it quite a good deal indeed.
That's less expensive than either the TC or the T5, and the specs are far superior.
Curious that they're still bothering to list either of those other devices on their web site.
I do wish they had a device with the new multi-connector at a $150 price point.
Though they do finally seem to have changed their open-box prices to reflect the recently lowered price of the E2, so that's something.
A friend told me that Sleepytime Gorilla Museum was like a cross between Einsturzende Neuebaten and The Residents.
But they were a lot quieter than that.
miss_chance and I thought they were more like a cross between The Dresden Dolls and Devo.
Sleepytime Gorilla Musuem had a lot of interesting instruments.
Some were recognizable: guitar, bass, xylophone, wa-wa pedal, circular saw blade.
But there was a woman who played something almost but not entirely unlike a hurdy-gurdy, and something that wasn't a dobro, and something that might have been somewhat inspired by a sitar.
It wasn't the show I was expecting.
But neither were Einsturzende Neuebaten, when I saw them.
I put a business card in a fishbowl and won a free lunch.
But proverbially, it's not really free: There's a 5-minute pitch for some financial services at the beginning.
It's also in Davis Square, rather than anywhere convenient to my office, since that's where I put the business card in.
I'm not sure if I want to take them up on the lunch or not.
China just launched two more astronauts, bringing their total to three.
What's interesting about that is they showed it on live TV, not tape delay.

I've previously posted that the problem with telling my younger self things is that my younger self wasn't too likely to listen. And the age at which I most needed advice was sixteen. But while those two things make this meme harder, they don't make it impossible. So:

The word for that thing you want to be when you grow up is "generalist", not "architect".

Figure skating sure is boring, isn't it? Try these speed skates on. If you get to be any good, they're your ticket out of gym class.

Just because the optician doesn't have the glasses you want doesn't mean they don't exist. Get your mom to take you to another store. You're right: the John Lennon look will really work for you.

Pay some more attention to the schematic for that circuit board you and your dad are working on.

Don't try to be clever on a witness stand. If you need clarification, say so instead of answering the question literally.

If you don't pick a musical instrument soon, your parents are going to pick one for you. Your mom is going to want a classical instrument. Countering with "piano" on the theory that keyboards are used in rock music too isn't going to get you out of having to play classical music all the time. Try "electric guitar" instead. Your dad will surprise you by backing you up on this. And your mom hates classical guitar.

If Isaac Asimov thinks something is fun to do, he's probably right, and you can do it too.

Those strange dreams you have about the trees are more significant than you know.

If I had known our Filk Guest was capable of this, I would have made more of an effort to make it to his concert.

For all that we enjoy music, ours is not a very musical household. There's a stereo in the living room which can drive a set of speakers in the kitchen, but our schedules mesh so badly that we can never use it. Dan used to play excellent bizarre music in his bedroom, but he's moved out now. And though there are a few CD-playing devices upstairs, it's inconvenient to use them and winds up scattering the CD collection when we do. I do listen to music in the car sometimes, when I remember to bring some with me, but that makes the scattering problem worse. I've been meaning to address this by ripping a bunch of MP3s to disk for upstairs, and burning MP3 CDs for the car (which can play them). But I'd been hindered until recently by a lack of disk space.

Now that I'm actually getting to this, though, I'm psyched to play MP3s on my Palm. The new toy has a built-in SD card slot, so transferring the files should be easy. But I spend over an hour banging on it this morning, getting nowhere -- the laptop just wouldn't recognize the card I put in it. I updated the drivers, and futzed around in the configs, and read a bunch of documentation, before finally realizing that the card I'd inserted was an MMC card, not an SD card, and the laptop wouldn't read it. Silly format-sharing standards.

So now I need an SD card. I was leaning towards getting another card anyway as 32M is a little smaller than most albums. The only question I need to answer is: how big?

From an otherwise entirely unnoteworthy quiz:

Punk: ...
You like to aggressively attack pop culture... Which somehow makes it love and mimic you.

I was listening to the Run Lola Run soundtrack just now while driving home late at night. Excellent driving music. Anyway, I noticed a funny thing about the second track. That's the one that's titled "Introduction", and has the extensive stopwatch sound effects.

Like most of the rest of the album, it's recorded at 140 beats per minute.

So my gym plays WBOS over the speakers in both the main workout area and the locker rooms. As I'm preparing to shower at the end of today's workout, I hear the DJ going down the list of concerts and cultural events going on. Any list of concerts in Boston naturally includes events at a club called Man Ray in Central Square. The DJ then moves on and describes a show at the Museum of Fine Arts. "This isn't like the usual stodgy stuff they have there," he says. "This guy works in photography, but he also does this really cool new thing where he takes the photographic paper and exposes it to light directly. It's a really cool effect -- check it out!"

Sigh. I suppose 80 years really is an eternity to Clear Channel Communications.

... a car that goes boom!

Current Music: soundtrack to Run Lola Run

Last night,

roozle and I randomly decided to go see Paul Westerberg at the Somerville Theatre. They were sold out and it was 25 minutes past showtime but we managed to buy some pretty good tickets from someone trying to unload them and the show hadn't actually quite started yet... score. I'm not super familiar with Paul Westerberg; I've heard some of his stuff covered in concert and one or two particularly famous pieces on the radio. It seemed to me like the more famous pieces were the ones with more complex guitar work, and the more obscure pieces were the ones with subtle lyrics... I suppose that shouldn't be such a big surprise, really. He had a couch and comfy chair up on stage with him, and a roadie-helper guy who wrangled guitars for him and, in an amusing moment, held his harmonica when he couldn't find the holster for it. At one point he invited a bunch of people up on stage to hang out on the couch; roadie guy gave a couple of cute, unattached-looking girls bottled water from Paul's stash and I made the prediction that they wouldn't be going home that night. Sure enough, they were still hanging around by a speaker stack as

roozle and I were among the last to leave... I hope they had a good time last night. I sure did.

phi

Entries tagged with music

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a meme from minoanmiss

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