Last night we were watching an episode of “Scrubs”. It featured an anime-eyed, ukelele playing actress who I vaguely recognized. Here she is in a romantic duet with the hapless, sweaty lawyer Ted:
Apart from being an actress, I remembered that she was in a musical comedy duo. I couldn’t remember their name, but I did recall the title of one of their songs: “Pregnant Women Are Smug”. Depending upon your state of mind, that video may either anger or amuse you. Proceed at your own risk.
So I started to google “pregnant women are”, and was amused by the possible results that Google suggested:
What an odd set of suggestions, eh? The results raised a related question in my mind: why would somebody phrase their search as “pregnant women are hot” or “pregnant women are moody”? It seems way more natural to search for “hot pregnant women” or “why are pregnant women moody?”
On severaloccasions in the past, I’ve railed against established artists permitting their music (or images of themselves) to be used in ads. According to Bill Wyman (thanks to AdHack for the pointer), that ship has sailed.
There is no longer even a debate, let alone a stigma. “If you did an advert, you were a sellout,” notes Billboard Executive Editor Tamara Conniff. “The Rolling Stones broke that when they allowed the use of ‘Start Me Up’ for the Windows campaign. Though there was an initial backlash, it suddenly made it okay for bands of integrity to do commercials. Now, it’s almost as if as an artist you don’t have a corporate partner [or] commercial, you’ve not really arrived.”
Mr. Wyman still doesn’t think it’s a very good idea. However, he wants to quantify sellouts, and devise “an objective formula for determining just how offensive a particular rock-based advertisement is”.
Tongue firmly in cheek, he enlists the help of a mathematician. They invent a formula for calculating what he calls the Moby Quotient. Here’s an illustrated version, with a number of examples. The Clash’s “London Calling” selling Jaguars? Bad. Bachman-Turner-Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” selling Office Depot? Not so bad.
I randomly happened upon this little technology demo from Last.fm. It’s called Boffin, and, using Last.fm’s metadata, it generates a tag cloud out of your music collection. You click a couple of tags, click play and it provides yet another way to slice and dice one’s sprawling music archives. Here’s what mine looks like:
The top half of the cloud is more accurate than the bottom half. I’m not sure how much of my music is “hair metal approved”, and I’m pretty sure it’s over-representing the fraction of my collection that is Norwegian.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about. When you install and first run Boffin, it needs to scan your music collection. I have about 10,000 songs, so that took quite a while. During this process, however, Boffin displayed this lovely visualization of my music:
The YouTube-hosted screencast video is a bit sketchy, but you get the idea. It’s a totally unnecessary feature–actually useless, as it happens. But I found the cascading images of bands kind of hypnotizing. I really appreciated that the app designer when that extra step to make a very ordinary process–scanning your hard drive for music–a little remarkable.
There’s something lovely and ephemeral about this ‘live’ video for Lisa Hannigan’s “I Don’t Know”. It’s shot through the window of a snug in a bar in Dingle, with the patrons (and their kids) looking on with a particularly Irish kind of quizzical indifference.
Ms. Hannigan is obviously easy on the eyes, but there’s more to the video’s success than that. The band is packed into this tiny space, her grinning, bald drummer is playing a piece of newspaper and everybody seems to be having a bloody good time. You can easy forgive that she comes in on the tambourine at the wrong moment. I wonder what number take this is.
We saw Lisa Hannigan live at SXSW and, I’m sorry to say, I was underwhelmed. The je ne sais quoi that makes this video so great was nowhere to be found.
I discovered the podcast for the CBC arts and culture radio program ‘Q’ while we lived in Malta, and listened to it quite regularly. When we returned to Canada and I had less free time, I grew a little weary of the format and host Jian Ghomeshi’s interview style, and unsubscribed.
Having just returned from watching the movie One Week (more on that later), I did a search for Liane Balaban, and discovered that there are a couple hundred video clips from Q on YouTube. As it turns out, the video version of Q also airs on the channel CBC bold (which apparently replaced the very poorly named CBC Country Canada). Never fear, it’s better than that insufferable radio-on-TV talk show on Sportsnet.
Last night I was watching an episode of “True Blood” on my laptop. In one scene, a character puts a CD on, and we hear the familiar strains of the Cowboy Junkies’ moody cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”. Directors seem to love this song–I’ve heard it in movies and on TV almost as often as that darn cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
Being a big geek, I wanted a closer look at the CD cover the character was holding. I took a screenshot–click for the large size:
It doesn’t look like any Junkies cover that I’ve ever seen. Of course, the CD’s owner is the kind of guy who would put the CD back in the wrong case. However, he’s also not the kind of guy who would own “The Trinity Sessions”, where this song originally appears. As you can see, I was troubled. Maybe the director wasn’t sure what song they’d use when they shot the scene?
As for “True Blood”, I’d give it a cautious thumbs up. It’s not brilliant television, but it’s got an offbeat, amusing story set against the creepy backdrop of rural Louisiana, a part of the world we rarely see on television.
We’re shortly off to South by Southwest, the big interactive, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. We’re there for eight or nine days, though we’re taking a little side trip into the countryside for a few days. I’ve never been to SXSW or Texas before, so there should be lots to discover.
The scope of the event is a bit daunting–more than 10,000 attendees, 108 film screenings, and hundreds of musical performances, panel discussions and parties. I’ve been paying attention to an unofficial SXSW blog and the Twitter search for ‘SXSWtip’ to try to get a handle on things. I’ve also been using this excellent web app from SCHED to assemble a schedule of what I plan to attend.
Posting may be light over the next week–we’ll see how it goes.
Last Saturday night we saw alternative country singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards at the Alix Goolden Hall (needs a Wikipedia page) here in Victoria. It was an all-around excellent concert experience. Edwards is a great songwriter blessed with a distinctive voice. I read one critic recently who described her as a “persuasive live performer”. That’s very apt–she demands that you listen to her.
She has three albums of really strong material, and any fan would have gone home happy with her well-chosen set list. In fact, the only song that I could name (without consulting my MP3 collection) that she didn’t play was “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like”. For the encore, she played a delightful version of “Mercury”, and then she and her husband-bandmate stepped in front of the mics to play a lovely, quiet version of the Everly Brothers “When Will I Be Loved”. Finally, they finished with a terrific, tumbling cover of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”. It’s a confident singer who ends her show with two covers.
It was, all in all, an excellent concert going experience, enriched by my first visit to the Alix Goolden Hall. It’s a converted 800-seat, 19th century church, and now belongs to the Victoria Conservatory of Music. I tried to determine what denomination the church had been, but couldn’t find anything on the web. It’s quite an austere space, with white walls, a sloped, curving balcony and ornate stained glass windows, so we guessed Greek Orthodox. It also had lovely acoustics–aside from the Chan Centre, probably the best my in-expert ears have heard on the West Coast.
Edwards’ opening act made me feel old. It was Dustin Bentall. Yes, that’s Barney Bentall’s son. Barney Bentall, for the unintroduced, was kind of a regionally-famous singer in the eighties and nineties. He played with a band called “The Legendary Hearts”, and they had hits like “Something To Live For”.
Every street and avenue in Manhattan is mentioned in a song. Okay, that’s technically not true. Well, it might be true, but I don’t have time to prove it. Still, in my time wandering around lower Manhattan, every street seemed to remind me of song lyrics. A few examples:
Lafayette Street - “Well, I’m standing on the corner of Lafayette” - “That Was Your Mother” by Paul Simon (though, admittedly, this may refer to a street elsewhere in the country).
Mulberry Street - “I’m a big man on Mulberry street, I play the whole part, I leave a big tip with every receipt” - “Big Man on Mulberry Street” by Billy Joel (also references a bunch of other Manhattan streets, for example, “Houston to Canal street”).
Wikipedia lists a (Circle Line) boat load of such songs. That would be a fun crowd-sourced Google Maps mash-up. Get people to identify songs, mark them on a shared Google map and link them to an audio file on the web. You’d end up with this groovy musical collage of the city. Then, of course, you could expand it to the whole planet. Somebody get on that, would you?
I’ve seen a couple of these signs attached to telephone poles around my neighbourhood:
They are, it turns out, a band. Maybe I’m overly curious, but a simple sheet of 8 x 11″ paper with the band’s (admittedly peculiar) name printed on it was enough to get me to look further. Had it been your ordinary photocopied indie band poster, I probably would have ignored it.
