More astute readers will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging. A lot of things have changed since my last post in October 2008.
Let’s sidestep the ones which currently feel most important! Gosh, don’t you love hearing that.
I’ve moved from high school to university; from a shared house with a travel agent and a bunch of Chinese in Adelaide’s leafy south-east to living alone in a flat in a suburb of Italians and retirement fortresses – a suburb all but unique in not being scorned by Adelaide Metro.
Well, I had approximately 6 months here without internet at home. I’m going to over-simplify matters by saying “yes, that is exactly as hard as you think.”
I hadn’t blogged for some time before that, and not for some time since. That is because blogging is really not important to me. Blogging often seems like pissing into the wind.
Successful blogs require dedication – and do I even want a succesful blog? Probably not. I certainly do not want to be a “dedicated blogger”.
I do not even think I have anything that special to say. There are more good blogs than could be read, and they are just the tip of an iceberg composed largely of utter rubbish. If we narrow the pool of blogs to a group so small as those made by people I know personally – there are blogs with more interesting things to say than me (fig 1, fig 2), more interesting ways to say them (fig 3, fig 4), or both. Does that mean I follow them? No. I talk to these people.
If I say that any distillation of their views is less wholesome than those people themselves, I hope they take it as a compliment.
I’m still listening to a lot of music! My music profile is still here, and while you can see from the charts what I’ve listened to most between now and October 2006, I’m going to recommend to you the bands I’ve gotten into much more recently. And don’t go thinking they are an accurate representation of my listening habits at large.
Eluveitie are not pronounced the way they are spelt. It’s “Elveyte”, I am told. They are Swiss, sing in a local dialect of Celtic (extinct, of course), and use bagpipes convincingly – it’s not a gimmick. I suggest you Youtube their song Inis Mona, and also Uis Elveti if you’re at all interested in Folk Metal.
The Cinematic Orchestra is, hm, chill-out jazz with electronic elements. Check out To Build A Home, it’s my favourite of theirs. You’ll probably recognise it from a Schweppes advert.
Kronos Quartet. So the elementally themed “Ghost Opera” freaked you out with the moaning and shrieking and splashing that accompanied the oriental tunes? You were scared away by Act III: Dialogue with ‘Little Cabbage’? Suck it up, go out and get their latest album Floodplain, a musical exploration of the middle east. Here is a serious review on the BBC website. It gushes compliments. And rightly so.
Yoshida Brothers are instrumental Japanese folk rock on traditional instruments, and remind me more of Altan Urag and Apocalyptica than Bond or Twelve Girls Band (which means they are actually good).
David Garrett is a classically trained violinist. Lots of people are taking violin in new poppy directions, he is one of them. He does it well, and owns obscenely expensive violins. That doesn’t bear any relation to how good he is, as proponents of the “Andre Rieu is a talentless Belgian” theory will tell you. You’re best off looking up his cover of Smooth Criminal, which I am keen on.
Globus – I didn’t think of this at first. I’ve had it so long, but I’ve ignored this blog longer. It’s cinematic music, as used in dramatic trailers. It may seem cheesy because vocals are almost always in English (rather than the Latin favoured by this genre), but if you approach this from a pop music angle, it’ll blow you away. It doesn’t feel contrived like E.S. Posthumus, and it doesn’t grow immediately old like the prolific X-Ray Dog. I have positive things to say about Corner Stone Cues, but I don’t know about their lasting power, as I’ve only had the album Requiem for a Tower for a month.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is a bit of a hack. I don’t have any pretentions of being able to compose music, but I find his work overly simplistic (not the same as minimalist) and over-emotional (not the same as melodramatic). Get your hands on Requiems by Giuseppe Verdi, Gabriel Fauré, and Johannes Brahms, in addition to Mozart’s which you doubtless already have.
I have recently banished Академический ансамбль песни и пляски Российской (known to the proletariat as the Red Army Choir) from my media player of choice because I have grown tired of them. Just so you know.
Tenochtitlan is a Russian-language band from Russia. They are Aztec-themed ethnic doom metal (if I were more of a hat, I’d call them ambient and progressive too). They were rather better than I expected from such a description. I expect novelty concepts to be something of a joke, but this is done really well. If the description doesn’t appeal to you, then you probably shouldn’t be getting it.
Gogol Bordello is gypsy punk. Sounds like a novelty, is likewise good – I’ve had this band for a long time, too. You should get it whether the description appeals or not. Be safe and YouTube Not A Crime or Zina-Marina.
In my time without internet, I read a lot of books. I’m still reading now. I re-read C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels, which are as always terrific. I re-read The Dice Man, which is the single book I have forced onto the most people. It was gratifying to see that a book I enjoyed so much when I was 15 is genuinely brilliant.
Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar series is excellent, and so is the Empire series he wrote in collaboration with Janny Wurtis. I insist you find and read Feist’s Magician, and you will probably hunt down the rest of the books based on that. It is one of those books which you finish in a surprisingly short time and cannot think of how to improve. I read Feist’s later (and much longer) revision, though. I think it is called “preferred version” or something, much in the way of a directors’ cut.
So far, this talk of books has been one-dimensional. Those were the best.
Well, A. A. Attanasio’s The Last Legends of Earth is presumably an okay book, but he seems to have no idea what he is doing when he manhandles a large clichéd soft sci-fi vocabulary around. I only picked it up because of the emphatic reviews on the back from such plausible sources as Locus, the L.A. Times and Silverberg. Why do people think being compared to Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men is a good thing? Just because something is a milestone work in a major genre of literature doesn’t mean it is actually good.
Richard Howard’s works must be burned at every opportunity. I speak of Bonaparte’s Sons and Bonaparte’s Invaders. This omnibus was dirt-cheap for a reason.
The style is reminiscent of the “chapter books” we read in junior primary, at age seven.
[Dialogue] [character] said, chuckling.
[character] looked [emotion]
It was evidently written by a congenital idiot (who enjoys period films) in consultation with the list of words which can be used place of “said”, which he has pinned to his wall.
I found a nice English-German bilingual school dictionary (Cassell’s, Great Britain) from before the war, in which all the German is set in Fraktur, the blackletter typeface long favoured by the Germans, which you will recognise from the side of the Hindenburg.
Since I’ve been talking about books for a while, I’ll just repeat that China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is brilliant. I must have said that in a previous blog.
I also have a tumblr. I’m certain it has been called “picture blogging for idiots” at some point. For exactly the same reasons, it is much more accessible and maintainable than a traditional blog. Q: Is mine safe for work? A: Maybe.
It is perhaps the knowledge that my ramblings go on for so long that keeps me from blogging.
My sleep cycle is about seven hours out, which means I’m jet-lagged from Istanbul, without actually leaving Adelaide. That means I should probably be making towards bed.
So; good night, internet~
