Simon Wistow’s blog

90s Music Monday

2007-08-27T22:37:24Z

Hmm, I'd forgotten it was Monday. Pesky Bank Holidays playing trickses.

So, the final entry in our little musical triptych - the divine Deal sisters and their catchy, popular beat combo.

Not to be confused with the excremental "Cannonball" by Damien Rice, this video was directed by Spike Jonze, in only his third music video directorial attempt, and Kim Gordon in, well, her first. "100%" by Sonic Youth was, incidentally, Mr Jonze's second music video. There's some sort of clever comment to make there. Maybe.

So, worked it out then? Do you even care? No? Yes? Ambivalent? Get it over with oh god just shut up?

** INSERT ALMOST CERTAINLY UNNECESSARY SPOILER SPACE **

They were back to back mixes on the semi ubiquitous (in the UK anyway) "2 Many DJs Part II" album.

Yeah as lame and unsatisfying as an overcooked one legged chicken on a one course dégustation menu but there you go. I promise never to do it again.

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You cannot betray your ideals, your ideals betray you

2007-08-20T07:47:18Z

My life can officially be fitted in a 25 square foot storage locker with space left over. Or, to put it another way, I could have had all my possession in the spare room for the past 5 years and had the rest of the flat as some sort of paean to ascetic minimalism.

All Packed Up

Highlights included

14 games consoles of various flavours. In the picture you can make out both the Dreamcasts, the GC, the Jaguar, the 360 and, if you look carefully, the Saturn.
God knows how many games. You can see 2xSamba De Amigos, 2xBeatmanias and 2xJungle Book Edition DDRs, Donkey Conga and Singstar.
72 cookery and food related books
*mumble* other books. Where mumble is defined as "an amount equal to several large boxes all of which are heavy enough to cripple a man"
3 sleeping bags (various weights), 2 tents, 2 roll mats for various combinations of practicality, comfort and weight considerations and a variety of altitudes and climates. My base camp tent is affectionately referred as "The Tent Majal" by Mike and is large enough for me to stand up in.
Misc hats. Visible are sombrero, alpine, jester's (as bought at Rhein In Flammen in 1995) and my Kevlar. Which pretty much covers all situations from spontaneous outbreak of war to hiding in a Big Top.
This awesome CD which I'd forgotten completely about.

Album

Why yes. That is a rubber gimp mask. Thank you for noticing.
A Phenominator. I've never got it to work.

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90s Music Monday

2007-08-20T07:23:56Z

Part two in a 3 parter - all inextricably linked if only through my warped mind. Or something. I haven't slept much recently.

Anyway, last week's guess of "small" was actually prescient but for the wrong reasons. However I think a couple of people, probably British, will guess the third and final track from this one.

Skee Lo- I wish

Sometimes I think this track was actually some sort of CIA sponsored MK Ultra style experiment - that hidden in those synth horns there's some sort of coded instructions or something and they'll be able to measure its success by measuring sales of rabbits in hats. And bats. And '64 Impalas.

Awww, c'mon. You know that just reading those lines makes you want to bounce up and down.

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90s Music Monday

2007-08-13T14:50:46Z

The next three 90s Music Mondays are going to have a theme despite being wildly different songs. Prize for the person who figures it out (although to be fair it's not that difficult). And it's not just my penchant for really dirty basslines or German Electronica.

Jeans Team - Keine Melodien

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Life Through A Lens

2007-08-06T23:08:58Z

On Valentines Day I went with Nick and rebecca to the pillow fight down by the Ferry Terminal which was awesome - especially if you're stuck on the other side of the pond with nary a buxom wench to frolic with.

What struck me - apart from a goose down pillow upside the head of course - was that there seemed to be at least as many people taking photos as there were getting stuck in. I mean, and here I use the vernacular, WTF? Who wants to sit on the sidelines? What's the point in obsessively documenting instead of experiencing?

Since then I've been meaning to do this.

Take_part

I'm thinking of doing tshirts.

It also reminded me (in a tangential way - there's been quite a bit of Laphroaig in my life this evening including a dram from a £300 bottle of, as yet unreleased, 27 yr old) of when I was travelling round Australia way back. This was before Digital Cameras got big and I had a Olympus Mu or something. Which broke. So I bought this crappy thing which took awful photos and had a tendency to make everything slightly pinkish.

Not only that - I'm a shit photographer. I just don't have the eye or the patience. It's ok, I'll cope.

In Cairns I went to Peter Lik's Gallery and bought one of his books. I printed out all the emails I'd sent home and put them in the pages which had photos of what I was talking about at the time and gave the book to my parents when I eventually got home. Why? Because my photos, whilst they may have been taken by me, didn't capture what i was feeling at the time or how those places really looked because, well, he's a professional with professional equipment and a professional eye who can sit in one spot for a day waiting for the light to be juuuuust right and then take the photo. Or take 30 of them and choose the best one. In my opinion he captured what it was like for me to be there better than I could have and so I could get on with experiencing it instead.

Works for me.

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90s Music Monday

2007-08-06T10:35:18Z

At the same time that this was released The Divine Comedy also released a track called "Something For The Weekend" - or "Something In The Woodshed" as most people seem to know it. It was good if you were into the surreal lounge act stylings of The DC but for me it just didn't compete.

Unfortunately it did much better in the charts and was played a lot more. Probably because it wasn't blatantly about drugs. This from a country which sent Ebeneezer Goode to number 1 in the charts.

And thus began summer of false starts -
Radio: "And next ... Something for the Weekend"
Me: "Yay!"
Radio: ... Melodic Strains of Divine Comedy ...
Me: "Boo!"

But now, thanks to the magic of YouTube I can relive that golden summer just the way I want. Apart from the other crappy stuff that happened. Some of which involved Welsh madness other than the Super Furry Animals.

Something for the Weekend

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I get too tight I come undone

2007-08-04T12:02:49Z

It's the first sunny weekend we've had in ages. In fact it's the first weekend we've had for a while in which ones mind hasn't immediately turned to Revelations 12:15 or wondered if perhaps the marketing push for Evan Almighty might not have gone a leeeetle too far.

And yet I'm inside, hacking. Partly because last night ate at a restaurant that serves burritos the size of your head so I'm feeling kind of sluggish this morning but mostly because I'm stupid.

Anyway, I wrote a tool to back up your Vox last week but, it occurred to me that not everyone has the will or way to download a bunch of Perl modules, install them and then run the script.

So I've been nice and written VoxSlurp which is neither Web2.0 -ey or Ajaxy but should make it easy for you to download all your public posts as an Mbox file (which most mail readers will understand - under Outlook do 'File -> Import -> Internet Mail and Addresses -> Eudora and then navigate to the mbox file you've just downloaded).

Ain't I nice.

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Back up, back up, cause its on

2007-08-01T09:48:44Z

Do you ever have an urge to backup you Vox blog to a local machine? Specifically as mail? Then lust no more.

Can download as mbox, maildir and Mh if you really want. Stores tags, ids, the original url, the html version and a text version.

I also ought to make it able to snarf your embedded media and do the cid dance or something.

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