Down by the canal in London (Taken with instagram)
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#notebook
This piece has followed me in my head for years. It’s on the soundtrack to Heaven, a film that is ninety minutes of living in the times between times, living in the time you’ve got left, living in the time made golden by your doom.
That short passage, where the violin comes in and plays one long note and then goes up an interval and plays another long note, to me embodies the sensation of knowing you are living through an achingly beautiful moment, and knowing it is passing, and knowing that the knowledge of the passing is what turns mundane happiness into stabbing beauty.
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I love this shot from Taxi Driver. Even though Travis Bickle is supposedly God's lonely man, we know him as the subject of a Hollywood film. But, earlier in the film, in this shot, he is just another unremarkable guy, alone in the early morning, in the distance, swigging from a bottle of whiskey.
And I love how, in the "Are you talking to me?" scene, you can hear the everyday noise of people outside as Travis Bickle goes mad inside:
#notebook
I love this shot from Taxi Driver. Even though Travis Bickle is supposedly God's lonely man, we know him as the subject of a Hollywood film. But, earlier in the film, in this shot, he is just another unremarkable guy, alone in the early morning, in the distance, swigging from a bottle of whiskey.
And I love how, in the "Are you talking to me?" scene, you can hear the everyday noise of people outside as Travis Bickle goes mad inside:
#notebook #medianotes
Tool and Mogwai made me realise that musicians are allowed to do anything they want.
But Tool had a stronger effect because they were my first real exposure to metal, which meant they were able to crystalise the most consistently important concept in my musical taste: beauty is harsh.
I first heard Mogwai in 1997, when I was about sixteen. I was lying in bed in the dark listening to The Breezeblock, Mary Ann Hobbs’s late night music programme on Radio One. She played Like Herod, a twelve-minute track from Mogwai’s first album, Young Team. I hadn’t heard music like that before: instrumental by default, symphonically structured, spoken word, moods rather than songs, occasional vocals that were accents, rather than scaffolding, and incongruous shifts in instrumentation and tone from section to section. I thought that Mogwai had, somehow, invented all this stuff. It wasn’t until 2002 that I realised that Slint had already got most of the way there by 1991.
I first heard Tool in 1998, when I was seventeen. My friend, Harry, lent me their 1996 album, Aenima, and I took it home and played it through the speakers built into the monitor of my Mac. I played it a lot over the next five or six years on my CD Walkman.
Aenima took me much further than Young Team. It was the first piece of modern music in which I heard the non-standard time signatures. It was the first record I heard that combined anger and sadness and melody into beauty. It was the first record I heard that had an overarching theme. The first record I heard that had continuity between songs. It made me consciously seek out weird, extreme music, music that would broaden my horizons and maybe give my brain more versions of that moment in Third Eye when Maynard James Keenan sings, “So good to see you, I missed you so much”: the joyous/agonising high of a sound that is simultaneously sad and beautiful, melodic and abrasive.
Most importantly, it was the record that made me fully aware of the fact that music doesn’t just come from some obscured, instinctual, idiot savant place in the brain. It is intentional art, just like novels and films and paintings. It is - can be - a series of conscious decisions, some of which the musician is unsure of. This is excellently illustrated in Third Eye by the two moments when Maynard James Keenan sings, “Prying open my third eye.” The first time, it stops the song with the long, arrhythmic pauses between repetitions. The second time, it is in parallel with a polyrhythmic drum beat, and repeated many more times, and totally cathartic.
Fourteen years later, poor Harry still hasn’t had his CD back.
#notebook
Tool and Mogwai made me realise that musicians are allowed to do anything they want.
But Tool had a stronger effect because they were my first real exposure to metal, which meant they were able to crystalise the most consistently important concept in my musical taste: beauty is harsh.
I first heard Mogwai in 1997, when I was about sixteen. I was lying in bed in the dark listening to The Breezeblock, Mary Ann Hobbs’s late night music programme on Radio One. She played Like Herod, a twelve-minute track from Mogwai’s first album, Young Team. I hadn’t heard music like that before: instrumental by default, symphonically structured, spoken word, moods rather than songs, occasional vocals that were accents, rather than scaffolding, and incongruous shifts in instrumentation and tone from section to section. I thought that Mogwai had, somehow, invented all this stuff. It wasn’t until 2002 that I realised that Slint had already got most of the way there by 1991.
I first heard Tool in 1998, when I was seventeen. My friend, Harry, lent me their 1996 album, Aenima, and I took it home and played it through the speakers built into the monitor of my Mac. I played it a lot over the next five or six years on my CD Walkman.
Aenima took me much further than Young Team. It was the first piece of modern music in which I heard the non-standard time signatures. It was the first record I heard that combined anger and sadness and melody into beauty. It was the first record I heard that had an overarching theme. The first record I heard that had continuity between songs. It made me consciously seek out weird, extreme music, music that would broaden my horizons and maybe give my brain more versions of that moment in Third Eye when Maynard James Keenan sings, “So good to see you, I missed you so much”: the joyous/agonising high of a sound that is simultaneously sad and beautiful, melodic and abrasive.
Most importantly, it was the record that made me fully aware of the fact that music doesn’t just come from some obscured, instinctual, idiot savant place in the brain. It is intentional art, just like novels and films and paintings. It is - can be - a series of conscious decisions, some of which the musician is unsure of. This is excellently illustrated in Third Eye by the two moments when Maynard James Keenan sings, “Prying open my third eye.” The first time, it stops the song with the long, arrhythmic pauses between repetitions. The second time, it is in parallel with a polyrhythmic drum beat, and repeated many more times, and totally cathartic.
Fourteen years later, poor Harry still hasn’t had his CD back.
#notebook #medianotes
Keaton Henson - Small Hands - YouTube
I really like this video. A sad, simple story.
#notebook
Keaton Henson - Small Hands - YouTube
I really like this video. A sad, simple story.
#notebook
Dear Sarah,
I heard that you’ve turned into a goth, and I think that’s great, if that’s what makes you happy. I have an old pair of black boots with silver buckles that I don’t wear anymore, and you can have them if you want them. Also, I wanted to ask: What, if anything, is fluttering in your heart? I wanted to ask if it has to be a black crow or a vampire bat… or if maybe instead it could be a kite that has broken loose from the string that you were holding—or the string that we were holding—sometime when we were teenagers, or maybe in our early twenties? Could it be a kite which is now rolling over and over on itself in the sky like an unborn baby, and slowly shrinking into a dot, and then a spec of black, and then something we’re not even sure we’re watching, but then, for sure, absolutely nothing at all? Get back to me about this when you have a chance.
I hope you’re doing well.
xo
s
#notebook
Dear Sarah,
I heard that you’ve turned into a goth, and I think that’s great, if that’s what makes you happy. I have an old pair of black boots with silver buckles that I don’t wear anymore, and you can have them if you want them. Also, I wanted to ask: What, if anything, is fluttering in your heart? I wanted to ask if it has to be a black crow or a vampire bat… or if maybe instead it could be a kite that has broken loose from the string that you were holding—or the string that we were holding—sometime when we were teenagers, or maybe in our early twenties? Could it be a kite which is now rolling over and over on itself in the sky like an unborn baby, and slowly shrinking into a dot, and then a spec of black, and then something we’re not even sure we’re watching, but then, for sure, absolutely nothing at all? Get back to me about this when you have a chance.
I hope you’re doing well.
xo
s
#notebook #medianotes
Animal Collective - Fireworks 2.mp3
The sound of summer.
#notebook #medianotes
Girl Walk // All Day: Chapter 2 on Vimeo
I like dance movies. Somehow, though they often appear indistinguishable from music videos, they are not boring. This clip is one track’s worth of a dance movie of pure joy set to Girl Talk’s album, All Day.
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Girl Walk // All Day: Chapter 2 on Vimeo
I like dance movies. Somehow, though they often appear indistinguishable from music videos, they are not boring. This clip is one track’s worth of a dance movie of pure joy set to Girl Talk’s album, All Day.
#notebook
Des Ark - house show (solo) - YouTube
I think I’ve posted this video to every blog I’ve ever had. It shows my favourite performance of my favourite Des Ark song. But, further, it depicts an incredibly rich and specific scene: a gig in someone’s house, members of the audience standing around and as important in the frame as Aimée Argote, her too-small guitar, a gig that appears to be boiling hot when she wipes the sweat from the face with her t-shirt that is part of a utilitarian I-have-been-on-tour-for-weeks outfit, and the intro she gives that lasts longer than the song and that reflects the other bands at the gig.
This is my second favourite performance of this song. You will notice that it includes her whole band. You will also notice that the video has absolutely no atmosphere. However, I love how fast the song moves along, and I love the way she sings the “I know” in “And I know I’m using drugs every morning” as a half-screech.
#notebook
Des Ark - house show (solo) - YouTube
I think I’ve posted this video to every blog I’ve ever had. It shows my favourite performance of my favourite Des Ark song. But, further, it depicts an incredibly rich and specific scene: a gig in someone’s house, members of the audience standing around and as important in the frame as Aimée Argote, her too-small guitar, a gig that appears to be boiling hot when she wipes the sweat from the face with her t-shirt that is part of a utilitarian I-have-been-on-tour-for-weeks outfit, and the intro she gives that lasts longer than the song and that reflects the other bands at the gig.
This is my second favourite performance of this song. You will notice that it includes her whole band. You will also notice that the video has absolutely no atmosphere. However, I love how fast the song moves along, and I love the way she sings the “I know” in “And I know I’m using drugs every morning” as a half-screech.
#notebook
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
#notebook
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
#notebook #medianotes
04 The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song.mp3
Excerpt 1:
Though you may not believe it
You know what she says to me next
As I repeat it
That line about getting a blow job
That Leonard sings
She said it made her
Want to do naughty things
Right about then
I should have asked
If she knew
What the Chelsea charged
If we got a room for two
But I didn’t and I know
I’m a schmuck, don’t you doubt it
The only thing I did
Was write this stupid song about it
If I was Leonard Cohen
Or some other song writing master
I’d know to first get the oral sex
And then write the song after
Excerpt 2:
You may think it’s pathetic
That I sing this song
And that she will never know it
But think a minute about what that means
And you’ll realise it’s actually a wonderful thing
That all around the world
There maybe folks singing tunes
For the love of others folks
They barely knew
And it puts a smile on my face
Yes, it do
And let me tell you
You ought to be smillin too
‘Cos the next time you feeling
Kinda lonesome and blue
Just think that someone somewhere
Might be singin about you
And I love the fact that he released a version that has him gulping part way through a line.
#notebook
04 The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song 2.mp3
Excerpt 1:
Though you may not believe it
You know what she says to me next
As I repeat it
That line about getting a blow job
That Leonard sings
She said it made her
Want to do naughty things
Right about then
I should have asked
If she knew
What the Chelsea charged
If we got a room for two
But I didn’t and I know
I’m a schmuck, don’t you doubt it
The only thing I did
Was write this stupid song about it
If I was Leonard Cohen
Or some other song writing master
I’d know to first get the oral sex
And then write the song after
Excerpt 2:
You may think it’s pathetic
That I sing this song
And that she will never know it
But think a minute about what that means
And you’ll realise it’s actually a wonderful thing
That all around the world
There maybe folks singing tunes
For the love of others folks
They barely knew
And it puts a smile on my face
Yes, it do
And let me tell you
You ought to be smillin too
‘Cos the next time you feeling
Kinda lonesome and blue
Just think that someone somewhere
Might be singin about you
And I love the fact that he released a version that has him gulping part way through a line.
#notebook #medianotes
This is the final track from Aftertime. I feel bad posting it in isolation, because the album is a proper collection of tracks that has a beginning and takes you on a journey. Further, it’s unrepresentative of the rest of the album: it’s much shorter than the central pieces that are seven or eight minute worlds, it’s less measured, it’s easier. But the final foghorn blasts are such a perfect ending, such a beautiful replacement of calm and analysis with rage, that it’s my favourite.
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This is the final track from Aftertime. I feel bad posting it in isolation, because the album is a proper collection of tracks that has a beginning and takes you on a journey. Further, it’s unrepresentative of the rest of the album: it’s much shorter than the central pieces that are seven or eight minute worlds, it’s less measured, it’s easier. But the final foghorn blasts are such a perfect ending, such a beautiful replacement of calm and analysis with rage, that it’s my favourite.
#notebook #medianotes
The essays:
Tom Klein Peter wrote a wonderful series essays (see above) about being the lead dev at Audiogalaxy. The excerpt below is one of my favourite pieces of writing about programming. It combines an analogy of springs and weights that illustrates the way programming can change the way you think about systems, and a description of the loveliness of the light in the morning after a night spent programming that illustrates how the demands of your art can show you the world in a new way.
In short, it demonstrates how a part life of productivity and a part life of fun can enrich each other to produce something that makes your head explode with associative pyrotechnics.
As we worked through the bugs, the uptime turned into minutes, then hours, and eventually the service virtually never crashed. With hundreds of instances deployed, we got so much traffic that we were able to remove all the bugs we were likely to run into. We had one or two machines that would crash every month or two with inscrutable core files. Because it was always the same machine, I eventually attributed this to faulty memory. The idea that you could write software that was more reliable than hardware was fascinating to me.
In fact, almost everything about the scale of the software fascinated me. I found that a system with hundreds of thousands of clients and thousands of events per seconds behaved like a physical machine built out of springs and weights. If one server process stalled for a moment, effects could ripple throughout the cluster. Sometimes, it seemed like there were physical oscillations – huge bursts of traffic would cause everything to slow down and back off, and then things would recover enough to trigger another burst of load. I had never even imagined that these sorts of problems existed in the software world and I found myself wishing I had taken control theory more seriously in college.
Keeping up with the traffic at this time was difficult, but in retrospect, it was really a lot of fun. I had graduated from UT in December of 2000 and moved downtown within walking distance of both 6th Street and the office. I spent the summer on a completely nocturnal cycle, partially because of the Texas heat, but mainly because restarting services was easier at 3 in the morning. I was tired of staying up late to deploy new code, so I just changed my schedule. Audiogalaxy users had led me to a set of live trance mixes from clubs in Europe which turned me into a diehard electronica fan, and driving around Texas to catch DJs on the weekend was much easier if staying up until 8am was normal. I bought some turntables and a lot of vinyl. And a couch. The light in my apartment when I got home in the morning was very lovely.
#notebook
The essays:
Tom Klein Peter wrote a wonderful series essays (see above) about being the lead dev at Audiogalaxy. The excerpt below is one of my favourite pieces of writing about programming. It combines an analogy of springs and weights that illustrates the way programming can change the way you think about systems, and a description of the loveliness of the light in the morning after a night spent programming that illustrates how the demands of your art can show you the world in a new way.
In short, it demonstrates how a part life of productivity and a part life of fun can enrich each other to produce something that makes your head explode with associative pyrotechnics.
As we worked through the bugs, the uptime turned into minutes, then hours, and eventually the service virtually never crashed. With hundreds of instances deployed, we got so much traffic that we were able to remove all the bugs we were likely to run into. We had one or two machines that would crash every month or two with inscrutable core files. Because it was always the same machine, I eventually attributed this to faulty memory. The idea that you could write software that was more reliable than hardware was fascinating to me.
In fact, almost everything about the scale of the software fascinated me. I found that a system with hundreds of thousands of clients and thousands of events per seconds behaved like a physical machine built out of springs and weights. If one server process stalled for a moment, effects could ripple throughout the cluster. Sometimes, it seemed like there were physical oscillations – huge bursts of traffic would cause everything to slow down and back off, and then things would recover enough to trigger another burst of load. I had never even imagined that these sorts of problems existed in the software world and I found myself wishing I had taken control theory more seriously in college.
Keeping up with the traffic at this time was difficult, but in retrospect, it was really a lot of fun. I had graduated from UT in December of 2000 and moved downtown within walking distance of both 6th Street and the office. I spent the summer on a completely nocturnal cycle, partially because of the Texas heat, but mainly because restarting services was easier at 3 in the morning. I was tired of staying up late to deploy new code, so I just changed my schedule. Audiogalaxy users had led me to a set of live trance mixes from clubs in Europe which turned me into a diehard electronica fan, and driving around Texas to catch DJs on the weekend was much easier if staying up until 8am was normal. I bought some turntables and a lot of vinyl. And a couch. The light in my apartment when I got home in the morning was very lovely.
#notebook
Dreamland EP_ marimba and shit-drums.mp3
One of Spencer Krug’s side projects. I would often listen to this as I walked home from a party, across Berlin, at eight a.m.
"The girls, all ready in their swimsuits
They are sitting on the pier
I will swim to them like a fish
I have ridden on these waves
I will be there in no time"
#notebook
Dreamland EP_ marimba and shit-drums 2.mp3
One of Spencer Krug’s side projects. I would often listen to this as I walked home from a party, across Berlin, at eight a.m.
"The girls, all ready in their swimsuits
They are sitting on the pier
I will swim to them like a fish
I have ridden on these waves
I will be there in no time"
#notebook #medianotes
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — Art of the Title
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — Art of the Title
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"I wanted to say ‘why the long face?’
[slowly slip away with your long face]
Sparrow perch and play songs of long face
Burro buck and bray songs of long face
Sings ‘I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay just to lift your long face
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious long face
& though our bones they may break & our souls separate
Why the long face? Milkymoon
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil
Why the long face?'"
#notebook
"I wanted to say ‘why the long face?’
[slowly slip away with your long face]
Sparrow perch and play songs of long face
Burro buck and bray songs of long face
Sings ‘I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay just to lift your long face
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious long face
& though our bones they may break & our souls separate
Why the long face? Milkymoon
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil
Why the long face?'"
#notebook #medianotes
Hurray for the Riff Raff - Look Out Mama | Notes from Mt Pleasant - YouTube
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