Ok, so I'm being lazy given the fact that I was talking about this song last week but goddamn it - it's an achingly beautiful video and I stand by what I said about the opening line being one of the best ever[*]
Also, it's pissing down with rain here (which means it's snowing in the mountains) and I have a headache from landing on my head after a failed 180° up in Breckenridge this weekend so I'm going to let myself off.
[*] The other being
Go ahead you fucking sadists,
Pucker up and kiss some babies,
Kiss them till they die of rabies,
(Get your tits out for the ladies)
from Carter USM's "Suppose You Held A Funeral and Nobody Came" which is, in itself, charmingly prefaced with a sample from Flatliners along the lines of "Shit faced, rat turd, ass licking son of a bitch"
As a callous and shallow youth, PJ Harvey represented an external manifestation of a internal dilemma. Superficially I enjoyed chugging, distorted guitars layered behind songs screamed by young men such as myself. Aggressive, angry and, dare I say it, immature. If I'm being brutally honest not much has changed. At least about the immature bit anyway.
But then I also loved PJ Harvey whose music veers between ethereal beauty and savage ugliness one second and then between knuckle dusting agression and erotic tristesse another. Sometimes in the space of the same song.
I mean, how is a boy supposed to efficiently pigeonhole women if these are all the same person?
Listening to PJ Harvey is inextricably tied into my brain with the ghosts of girlfriends past. The first girl to ever give me a look like the one from "This Is Love" - a semi-disparaging challenge from across the room that flipped my stomach and was my first realistion that I was doomed to be eternally attracted to complex women - and who later wrote me a letter which ended with the line "I just want to sit here and watch you undress" and thus irreversibly damaged my psyche.
I'm not alone - swathes of Nick Cave's best album "The Boatman's Call"[*], including the incomparable "West Country Girl", are the result of brooding over Polly Jean - and any woman who can do that to The Cavester is surely in possession of some sort of magical, voodoo witchcraft.
Listening to "C'Mon Billy" still evokes memories of sitting in front of a fire with someone for hours feeling broken which are so strong that even by typing it I can smell the smoke and almost hear the crackle.
and "Down By The Water" makes me smile whilst also making me sad for a whole bunch of reason which, well, you don't get to know. But it's also one of my favourite videos ever:
[*] the first line of which is:
♪ Now I don't believe in an interventionist God ♪
Possibly the best line ever to kick off a album ever.
I'm not sure why but I had this stuck in my head all yesterday in between shouting streams of furious invective at the fuckwits camped out in the middle of the slope as if they'd somehow confused it with some sort of quilting party. Possibly it was inspired by the fact that Mr C is selling off his record collection although it appears that he's somewhat disparaging of the peoples of the intarweb, opining that "I bet none of you who talk shit have ever heard me play (or even go out very much, lol)" which is blatantly not true. I went out to Taco Bell and Krispy Creme just last weekend and I recently queued up all night to buy "Wrath of the Lich King. I even talked to some of the people in the line until I found out they were Alliance.
A quick translation guide for those not fluent in Cockney Rhyming Slang:
- Veras means Vera Lynns which means Skins which are cigarette rolling papers
- Salmon means Salmon and Trout which means Snout which is loose tobacco
When The Shamen performed this on Top of the Pops (a venerable and now deceased musical chart show in the UK) they were asked to tone down the gratuitous DRUG references. Instead they ended with "Has anybody got any underlay" and explained that they were now making gratuitous RUG references. Chortles.
This is actually true. There is a reason why (that's quite enough now - ed)
It's a potentially welcome return to "Indie Girls Simon Had A Wicked Crush On When He Was Young" territory (see also Lamb, Sneaker Pimps ... &cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam) and deliciously crunch fractured beats.
In complete contrast to There Might Be Giants' "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and its somewhat cryptic lyrics for years I completely failed to get what this song was about despite such choice lyrics as
The Amazon fairy had been during the day and filled my stocking a box which was left outside my apartment door with all kinds of goodies ...
which is an awesome book about communities, urban sprawl and so called dormitory towns (albeit somewhat controversial ) - Bought to replace the copy lost somewhere in the year of moving. See also J Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency".
As a card carrying member of the nerd cabal I am required to like Neal Stephenson. Which I would anyway. Especially the sadly overlooked "Zodiac" and "Cryptonomicon" which is my go-to book to reread when I have insomnia. Or when I want to club someone to death with a handy oblong object.
One of the first ever snowboarders - let alone women snowboarders, the first woman to successfully land a backside 720 in competition and she used to date Dave Grohl. The only surprise is that I haven't bought this book before.
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH A GROWN MAN LOOKING AT FOOD PORN, OK! Also - having 73 cookbooks already is perfectly acceptable in this day and age.
...
Hmm, cooking, nerding, boarding, gaming, films and culture - If I'd rebought "Programming Perl" and
At school my (and presumably your) musical taste was very much influenced by one's friends. It was rare to really be into a band that nobody else liked, let alone had never heard of. Such is the social melange of highschool and the nature of network effects but unless my memory is deeply degraded (always a possibility) I seem to remember being the only person who listened to Eat.
I'm guessing that I probably first got into them because of their early Swamp Grass-esque sound, something an early introduction to The Masters of Reality and the Black Crowes had fostered but 1993s "Epicure" was more of a psychedelic indie sound. I have strong recollections of listening to "Shame" repeatedly, probably because of some doomed teenage romance or maybe just because I liked the lyric "verbal ram raid, tongue of steel"
I admit - I'd never seen this video until this morning, when, my interest piqued by uncovering a stash of long forgotten CDs, I went digging through YouTube. You can almost see exactly what went through the marketing peoples's heads when this video was being made - "Right, so Pearl Jam are big and Ange Dolittle had a heroin problem just like most of the Seattle scene so try and make him look like Eddie Vedder right. But we also like that Nirvana video with the Anarchist Cheerleader chicks where all the extras rush the band so try and work that in too. Ok? Sorted"
However, if there's one thing this video tells us is that a man should be able to wear an oversized polka dot smock with pride and not be ridiculed for it.
With games, as in life, sometimes being forced to do something different turns out to be the BEST. THING. EVAR.
Of course, sometimes it turns out to be a steaming pile which leaves you a broken, hollow husk of a human, screaming nigh animalistic laments every night as you vainly attempt to get some sleep despite the theater of the macabre that is playing inside your brain. But that's less common.
A case in point - the GBA port of Broken Sword. Lacking a stylus the developers were forced to find some other way to manipulate George and the various oddly useful objects he stumbled across in his struggle against the Knights Templars. Whilst purist fans of the point-n-click genre thought it an abomination many other sane people thought it a revelation - the direct control of the character (as opposed to clicking somewhere and then waiting, fingers tapping whilst they sauntered leisurely to wherever you'd directed them) meant you felt more involved and the ability to cycle through all selectable objects using the shoulder buttons relieved the player from the tedium of scrubbing the mouse pointer back and forth on each scene trying to discover the one pixel that would allow you to select the rubber chicken to combine with the pulley in order to get across the water to the voodoo lady.
So it was good, and the developers' diary about the process, long gone but kindly archived here by some philanthropic soul, is well worth a read if you're into this sort of thing.
I had a similar feeling the other day play rRootage on the iPhone.
rRootage is a game of the shoot'em'up persuasion, often referred to as schmups because gamers aren't, as a rule, the wittiest people ever to grace the face of the earth. In fact it's an example of what are often known as Bullet Hell games (or, if you're the kind of person to whom the word otaku is a compliment, not an insult then 弾幕 danmaku or, literally "bullet curtain" games) which, as the name suggests, are what would happen if hell was populated by spaceships firing millions of tiny shards of flaming death in your diretcion.
Bullet Hell games are bewildering to 99.99% of people watching them. A mixture of frenetic activity, psychotropic paint patterns, completely superfluous storylines and, strangely, often ridiculously cutesy anime girls
rRootage is one of the increasingly interesting, and usually free, home brewed shooters - if you get the chance then go download such gems as Every Extend and Warning Forever. The original rRootage by Kenta Cho, available for free from the author's page uses the BulletML language and some nifty genetic algorithms to present you with an every expanding and adapting tableau of ways to die in horrible firey pixel death. Recently the bewitchingly named Lazrhog ported it to the iPhone and iPod touch. Lacking a D-pad he had to innovate and struck upon making the ship follow your finger around.
Now the reason why most people stare slack jawed at people playing Bullet Hell games, like so many inbreds gumming awestruck at a shiny, metal horseless carriage, is that they're thinking about it the wrong way. The secret to most of these games is that, no matter what the size of the ship is, the only thing that can take damage is the cockpit, usually a scant 4 or 5 pxiels across, and this is what allows players to dance gaily through flaming fields of coloured mayhem. Secondly, they're not, despite what the name says, shoot-em-ups. Most of the time the ship auto fires for you anyway so the game is reduced, in its purest form, to merely guiding those 4 pixels through the ever shifting ebb and flow of bullets - in short it becomes more like that wobbly hand game where you try and guide the wire loop over the twisting wire without making it buzz.
The touch screen method of controlling the ship brings this fact out into startling clarity and suddenly your perspective shifts like you've been staring at a poster of messy green and red ducks in a row and suddenly you can see the fricking sailboat for the love of god, YES! FINALLY!
So yes, go play rRootage, experience the flip, enjoy the rush but don't come complaining to me when your nervous system goes for a burton and completely shuts down on you. I'm just saying.
Hot damn I love this weather - despite the snow already being here it's still sunny and for a boy of hardy Northern stock like me, still warm enough to be t-shirt weather. Apropos of that, or nothing, or whatever, some tweekin acid funk
As an aside; that guy at 1:20 - I used to have hair like him. I'm not saying I'm proud of it but I feel that I should share the fact in the interest of cathartic confession. Exorcise the demons so to speak.
