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Despite having been knocking round San Francisco, more or less, for over a year I'd yet to go see a show at the legendary Fillmore yet this week I've been to see two.

The spiritual home in San Francisco of the Psychedelic and Punk movements it maintains a couple of quirky traditions - namely that there's a bowl of free apples by the door, a uniformed Greeter who "welcomes you to the Fillmore" and on exiting certain shows you get a free copy of the one off promotional poster for the show.

Inside the walls are lined with copies of the posters and hundreds of photos of acts on stage. The main area looks more like a ballroom with large chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Talking to the security guard the balconies that ring the upper level are (privately?) owned by different people - I'm kind of intrigued what the deal is with them.

The acoustics are really very good although I kind of wish it had the Brixton Academy's slightly sloping floor. I was also really impressed by how fast people are able to leave - much quicker than the Empire, the Astoria or either of the Academies in Brixton or Islington.

So, the shows. First up

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players + Kate Nash

The family did a quirky set with lyrics made up to accompany sets of slides they'd bought from lawn sales. It was enjoyable in an amusing kind of way - nothing I rush out to go buy the album for - but part of me kept wondering about the people in the various slides.

Funny thing about Kate Nash - when I was moving from the UK I found an old bunch of stuff including a flyer from tiny gig I went to above a pub in Camden about 3 years ago with someone whose on and off again boyfriend was playing a set. Really small gig - no more than 20 people. I'd really enjoyed the last act who'd been this solo girl with a keyboard finding the flyer again I was slightly surprised to find that it was Kate Nash.

Including that time this was the 3rd time I've seen her. This time the set felt quite rushed - she galloped through the opening  Pumpkin Soup at double speed which is a kind of a shame because I really like the track - still entertaining but even Foundations felt a little hurried. It didn't help that everyone in the band apart from the drummer looked monged off their tits (although kudos to the lead guitarist for some deft instrument swapping). Stand out track was Nicest Thing - including that most British of lines "I wish that you knew that when I asked for two sugars I actually meant three".

Paul Nathan + Vermillion Lies + The Dresden Dolls

I was really psyched for this show - the times I've seen the Dolls before have been some of the best live gigs I've ever been too (perhaps the best if you count the gig at the Roundhouse last year). 

As a warm up compère Paul Nathan was pretty hard to beat. His magic tricks were good if not mind blowing but his patter was superb and his back and forth with the audience was incredibly engaging.

I'd never heard of the Vermillion Lies before but they were absolutely 'kin brilliant. Two sisters doing quirky vaudeville-cum-folk with a jet black streak of humour running through it and using everything from a typewriter to bells to a barbeque grill as instruments. I've tried to find some representative clips on the 'Tube but nothing seems to quite to convey quite how infectious it all was, even the clip of filthily catchy "Astronomer's Song" or they're much cuter in real life.

So, onto the Dolls.

Maybe I was over excited (it happens - try dosing me up on stuff laced with Tartrazine and watch me completely ADHD out), maybe I was tired (getting up at 5:45 am to go babysit an 18 month year old during Bay to Breakers will do that to you), maybe it was the time (a set that doesn't start until 10pm on a Sunday night, really?), maybe it's because we were standing at the back, maybe they're getting back into their stride after a break from touring or maybe it was the preponderance of new material (always a risky thing with a band, especially one with a cult following who dress up like you to come to your gigs and who know all the words) but ... how do I put this? It wasn't the best show of theirs I've been to.

Don't get me wrong - it was by no means bad. In fact it was actually pretty good especially since some of the crowd pleasers like "Shores of California", "Backstabber" and "Jeep Song" didn't get played. We still got "Girl Anachronism" and "Coin Operated Boy"  obviously, a raucous cover of "Fight for your Right to Party" (including East Bay Ray from the Dead Kennedys OMGWTFBBQ11!!!111) , a roaming torch song (which, for the life of me I can't remember the name of) and "War Pigs" as an encore.

So, in conclusion, I'd still recommend that if you get the chance to go see the Dolls play then you should because really they're pretty fucking awesome. And I'm thrilled to have found out about the Vermillion Lies especially since they're Bay Area natives.

Hmm, I appear to have reached the end without having a conclusion.

In most places in Europe this next track made number 1 or, at least, in the top 5 yet peaked at 21 in the US. I'd like to make an interesting and stimulating point about that but I honestly can't think of one. Something about the US rave scene lagging about 10 years behind the European one maybe? Meh.

You know, I almost forgot today was monday. Again.

I was convinced that for part of this video Gaz wore an Ushanka

An Ushanka, yesterday

quirkafleeg

I actually forgot that yesterday was Monday. I can't decide if that's tragic or not. sigh

I have a soft spot for Mark Romanek videos - especially the sublime "Hurt" for Johnny Cash, "99 Problems" for Jay-Z (although for the last I couldn't really tell you quite why) and the fantastically creepy "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails. No body seems to do lurking menace quite as well as him. Two of his videos - "Closer" and "Bedtime Story" for Madonna - are in the permanent collection at MOMA in New York (although I have to admit I don't really like either the track or the video of Madonna one).

One thing about his work - it ages incredibly well.

It kind of blows my mind that that video is 11 years old - if you showed it to me blind you'd have no problems convincing me that it's was a completely contemporary promo.

And like the rest of Romanek's work it's achingly stylish - hell, I hate 70s retro chic and yet watching this I find that suddenly it looks appealing.

And Ms Apple - worryingly thin yes (the New Yorker described her as "looking like an underfed Calvin Klein model") but somehow a seamless blend of coquettish innocence and wanton knowing. It's not often that you see a someone who manages to project remorse and relish at the same time.

Tell a lie  -  dogs do it when you catch them eating something they shouldn't but it's not quite the same, is it?

Once, in art class at school, I tried to bluff past my suckiness at the aesthetic by claiming I was creating modern, abstract peices whereby my teacher primly told me that you have to be good before you can break the rules. I think I probably responded that I was TIRED of these philistines not appreciating my work and that their insistence in wallowing in their own moribund, bourgeois notions of the same tired art clichés was bringing on a attack of the vapours.

I spent a lot of time in detention at school. A lot. Those who know me are, at this very moment, failing to feign surprise.

Anyway ...

If you are not a fan of the Warp records oeuvre then most of the output by bands like Autechre can sound like so much white noise. Don't believe me? Check out this video for "Grantz Graf"- it sounds like a skipping record. I'm being serious.

And yet it's strangely mesmerising.

Now I'm not nearly hip enough to be one of the people who really gets Autechre but I do kind of appreciate it. I even, through an series of events, have a copy of Gescom on mini-disc.

I also have a soft spot for Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson, another Warp artist,  who is also an accomplished 'classical' musician who fuses jazz with more abstract breaks and fast cut-ups. It's more accessible than Autechre but still pretty challenging stuff  -yet the jazz heritage clearly shines through. Like jazz itself it takes the rules and creatively breaks them.

Like my teacher was trying to point out - if you know the rules well enough then you can take risks with them, skirt the boundaries. There are obvious echoes to this in the world of molecular gastronomy which, by going back to fundamentals axioms, Principia Mathematica style, has produced results from the sublime to the shocking.

In music, squatting menacingly on both ends of that spectrum is the malevolent grin of Richard D. James.

Richard D James

It's funny - some people strive to be cool, to be known. They blow huge amounts of money, the go to all the hip parties, they make the right friends. They try. But some people are just naturally cool and some people are cool because they don't want to be.

And some people end up with a mythos.

There are stories about Richard James. That he owns a tank and a Russian submarine (true, apparently). That he owns the silver structure in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout (false). That he was once woken up by a courier from a record label wanting a remix he'd promised so he ran upstairs and grabbed a random DAT tape and the record company didn't notice the difference. That at 11 he created sound from a ZX81(which has no sound hardware) by using it to retune the video signal and cause different pitched hums from the cathode ray tube in the TV it was connected to.

Some of these stories he starts, some of them are started about him. Some of them are true. Some of them aren't.

Who cares? This is man who encodes image in tracks so that they're only visible using a spectogram viewer. A man who produces practically unlistenable glitches, squelches and bleeps and yet also manages to get to number 16 in the charts.

With songs like these.

Readers of a nervous disposition should probably just go watch a Norah Jones video.

of which James said

'Come to Daddy' came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed, and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.

The video for Windowlicker fits in 44 uses of the word "fuck" in under four minutes, averaging out at about 1 every 3 seconds. Both it and Come to Daddy were directed by Chris Cunningham who got his start doing the puppets for Spitting Image and later, the sculpture and animatronics for Alien³ and followed up Come to Daddy with the rather more mainstream Frozen video for Madonna.

To put it another way, it's Not Safe for Work. You've been warned.  It's also 10 minutes long but worth every second.

 
If you're not the kind of anal retentive like me who actually counted all the windows on the limo - there are 38.

And the French sample half way through is James' then French girlfriend and roughly translates as "I like to shag my dog" albeit in mildly obscure slang.

...

I like to think of myself as sort of an educational service. Not a very good one mind you, but a service none the less.

For some reason which completely baffles me I had Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" stuck in my head all yesterday. ALL of yesterday. But not all of the song. Just the hook. Over and over and over and over again.

No idea where it came from or why it lodged itself in my cerebellum but it turns out to be pretty good to snowboard too so I can't really complain. Plus you've got to love a song that starts off "Wearing nothing is divine, naked is a state of mind, I take things off to clear my head, to say the things I haven't said".

I have no recollection of ever buying a single Luscious Jackson record yet, a few years back a friend of mine was looking through my CD collection absent mindedly and commented that I didn't seem like the kind of person who would own every album. And apparently I did - not only that but one of them had my name written on the back of the back cover and another had a post-it note in my handwriting on the inside so it's not like there's any kind of plausible deniability or anything. 

To be honest it's not hard to see why I like them - textured tracks with strong bass lines and a judiciously healthy  dollop of electronic breaks and plenty of tempo and key changes which translate strangely well to an acoustic set

Named after a mispronunciation of Lucious "Luke" Jackson, a Philidephia 76ers player, their first concert was opening for The Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill and they were the first band to sign for the Beaties' Grand Royale label. So clearly they get respect.

Plus I could totally crush on Gabby Glaser.

Yet oddly I find their videos infuriating - especially "Ladyfingers" but even, to a lesser extent, "Naked Eye"^[*] - and I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

In that way I suppose they're the complete opposite of Feeder's "Just A Day" which despite having all the ingredients present that would normally make me start frothing at the mouth I find strangely captivating and could (and have) watched repeatedly for a unhealthy amount of time.

As if further proof was needed that I am Wrong in the Brain, inexplicably the Luscious Jackson clip is the only advert that Gap have ever done that hasn't immediately sent me into a paroxysms of  tooth grinding fury.

Yes, in case you were wondering. I was dropped on the head as a child. Thank you for asking.

So the Interwebs have been all a twitter (literally I suppose) about the Infocom archive. A million others will comment on it but I have a larger point to make.

The complete nerd in me is all squeefull. Stuff like this is interesting and deserves not to be lost. Hearing the story behind stuff like this is both entertaining and also informative and instructional - like the Post Mortems at Gamasutra.

But there's another part of me that's kind of annoyed by it.

It didn't really occur to me that Andy Baio wouldn't have at least tried to get in contact with the people involved. The post obviously had a lot of effort put into it so he wasn't rushing to release anything before the attack lawyers kicked his door in or anything.

He claims to be an independent journalist and, as someone who had a sniff at the jobbing journo thing (sadly the only thing I walked away with from that period of my life was a raging booze thirst and the ability to vomit up press releases like a freak show performer),  I know that's the thing you do - you check your sources. You get corroboration and comment. For a start that just plain polite - you know, the sort of thing a decent human being does. For fuck's sake those emails were written 20 years ago when passions were high. The people involved were probably very different people 5 minutes after they wrote the emails let alone 2 fucking decades.

Moreover it also makes for a better story - there will be more information, more body, a better balanced piece. Good journalism should try and be neutral and discover both sides of the story otherwise you end up with useless pap filled with demagoguery and dogmatic crap like Fox News and Michael Moore.

But you can kind of excuse Andy because, well,  when you're that excited and you can only see the good side of something you kind of get caught up with the rush and I can genuinely believe he didn't think he was doing anything wrong.

And then the people involved turned up in the comments. This is good. This is the great thing about the web. Most of them showed cautious approval and/or pointed out a couple of mistakes. Michael Bywater pointed out that he wasn't upset more just disappointed that Andy hadn't contacted him or anyone else and points out that there was plenty more information to be had. In a slight, but in my opinion anyway, completely understandable bit of pique he signs off

"There's a lot more where that came from but not for you, Mr Baio. You should have asked nicely."

Sadly, at this point, the screaming fucktards from the Queen's own 1st Royal Batallion of Internet Dicks arrive on the scene like a thousand drooling, poop-flinging monkeys - ululating and howling and generally lowering the IQ of the place by a cold 50 points.

Let's examine some of their crimes against sense shall we? Now I admit that these are cherry picked but I'm making a point here and they're by no means in the minority.

"Get over it, Bywater. How long are you going to sulk about the past?" - Mark Miller

Err, as long as people keep bringing it up?

"Yes it would have been better to contact those involved but if they hadn't responded, or they said no then what?" - Robert McGovern

You do what any other journalist does - note the fact that couldn't be contacted. You've at least made an effort.

"Michael Bywater, while I understand your point, you also have to understand the weblog community in general. Yes, this is not cutting journalism in any sense of the word, it is a fantastic insight from raw un-filtered data." - sKurt

Various other people on that thread have made all these points and made them well. My broader point is with sKurts "You have to understand the broader weblog community" assertion and with comments like

"The world needs less "journalists" and more "uploaders". Journalists are people who corrupt the information with their own opinions and misunderstandings, making it hard to get at the truth. Give me raw data any day." - Anonymous

and

"I'm grateful Andy Baio published this stuff without going through any red tape. Had he informed and consulted everyone in advance, there probably wouldn't have been a blog post at all and we'd still be in the dark about Milliways." - Jan

Rather like the games industry itself the blog world needs to grow the fuck up. The increase in personal publishing has proved to be incredibly powerful and has started to wreak the changes that the Cluetrain Manifesto called for nearly 10 years ago. Being unfettered from corporate and government agenda is a hugely good thing. Look at the political dissidents blogging from Indonesia, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. From the people honestly talking about the mistakes and inside scoops from within Microsoft and Wall Street.

About 7 years ago I was involved with an abortive effort to write an anonymous leaks site for games journalists. Games Magazines live and die by their exclusives and, more so then, their ability to stick demoes on Cover Discs. If you gave a bad review to an Triple-A title then suddenly your advertising disappears. You hear rumours, get exclusives and you can't print them because you'll lose your job. This is not journalism. It's the opposite of journalism.

Penny Arcade - Kane and Lynch

This is where blogging and online journalism can help. But being an immature dickwad who can't distinguish between "the real truth", a biased story and common courtesy is actively hurting the cause they claim to be so passionate about.

And to be frank they can go fuck themselves.

san francisco: do a start up
london: start an experimental music group utilising only the sid chips from old c64s

san francisco: easy to get to the beach, the mountains, sonoma, napa or marin
london: easy to fly to europe

san francisco: french laundry
london: fat duck

san francisco: meet at zeitgeist or toronados or gestalt
london: meet at one of a bazillion pubs

san francisco: muni is cheap but slow and limited
london: tube is expensive but fast and pervasive

san francisco: one hundred years is a long time
london: one hundred miles is a long way

san francisco: profusion of white people with expensive cameras
london: profusion of white people with expensive cameras

san francisco: sushi
london: fish'n'chips

san francisco: "oh, you want to meet larry and sergei, they'll be at my next party"
london: "oh, you want to meet warren ellis and neil gaiman, they'll be at my next party"

san francisco: do a messaging website of use only to your friends in san francisco, london and helsinki
london: do a travel website of use only to your friends in san francisco, london and helsinki

san francisco: polyamorous techutropians
london: polyamorous goths

san francisco: breakfast burritos the size of your head
london: doorstep bacon butties

san francisco: therapy
london: misanthropy

san francisco: christian fascist goverment elected by naïve evangelicals
london: secular fascist goverment elected by naïve idealists

san francisco: expats saying they'll never go back
london: expats saying they'll never go back

san francisco: governed by a body-builder with a talent for self-promotion
london: governed by a bald-man with a talent for self-promotion

san francisco: fixies
london: bromptons

san francisco: people convinced that it's their birthright to change the world one social network at a time
london: people too drunk to realise they're changing the world

san francisco: echo chamber
london: circle jerk

It's a shame when good songs get over used. Moby's "Play" has the dubious distinction of being the first album that had every single one of its tracks licensed for an advert, movie or tv show. Hell, even Track 1 of the B-Sides album was used in the opening sequence of "Gone in 60 Seconds". But that does that mean it's a bad album - on the contrary doesn't that mean that it was a good album with absolutely no fillers in it?

To a lesser extent you get albums like Morcheeba's "Big Calm" which it seemed like everyone had played constantly to the point that, well, you got sick of it. There are only so many times you can hear "Down by the Sea" before each listen becomes an exercise in savage teeth grinding.

"Clubbed to Death" was kind of like that. Except, for all the over-exposure, I still love the song and I love this video.

I love the style, I love the theme and I love the ending. Although part of me wonders  if there were two post houses working on it simultaneously because some of the vfx are great yet some of the compositing is terrible. The colour palette reminds me strongly of being in Australia - particularly Sydney and Byron Bay all blown out pastel colours and strong, flat, white sunlight. Lying on a beach yesterday with the same sort of light, looking at the water through wind gnarled pine trees I had a moment of temporal dislocation and spatial dissonance.

My digressions ... let me show them to you.

"Clubbed to Death" was a slow burner - it'd been around on the UK club scene since 1995 but it wasn't until the Matrix came out in 1999 that it really started getting exposure and Dougan didn't release his Album "Furious Angels" until 2002.

To be pedantic the version that everyone knows as "Clubbed to Death" is in fact a remix called the "Kurayamino variation" or "The Variation of Darkness" - くらやみ (kurayami) meaning darkness in Japanese and の (no) being the possessive suffix (I think - I didn't do very well in Latin at school. Or Japanese at night school to be honest. Or school if I'm being brutally fair.)

Aaaanyway.

So, yes, the Kurayamino variation is a witty (I'm using the word 'witty' in the academic sense rather than in a Eddie Izzard, ROTFL, LOL sense) play on Elgar's Enigma Variations - the string movement at the start is from the first movement and the piano parts are Rob Dougan's own but are thematically inspired by the visible Theme and variations 1 and 2. Moreover the various remixes of Clubbed to Death are an echo of Elgar's own project - for example Clubbed to Death 2's classical part is built around Chopin's "Prelude No.4 in E-minor" and the "Abyssal Mix" was first reversed before any editing was done.  The whole song, according to a Dougan himself was inspired by the works of the writer Yasunari Kawabata, the film maker Yasujiro Ozu and the musician Rijuichi (Ryuichi) Sakamoto.

So there you go  - hopefully you now know something you didn't when you woke up this morning. And as we all know from GI Joe cartoons - "Knowledge is Power and Knowing is Half the Battle!". Now we have to stand and laugh as the comic side kick gets their tongue stuck to an icy lamppost or is accidentally buggered by an errant doberman or something.