I finally got my copy of Nurse With Wound's latest release, "Salt Marie Celeste". What a beautiful album. It's one track, 62 minutes long. From the press release:
Similar in concept to Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic. Salt Marie Celeste delves even deeper into the theme of dropping into unknown darkness and ultimate demise.This release apparently expands upon last year's Music for Horse Hospital, a CD of sounds that accompanied a joint art exhibit by David Tibet (of Current 93) and Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound). Salt Marie Celeste builds up a couple of chords, over and over. They're simultaneously warm and cold, some sort of haunting bellows type sound, rolling in waves under the entire piece. Already meditative and somber, this listener found himself in rocks and crags and encroaching fog at the tip of some island. As the piece continues, new sounds emerge: a rattling kind of hissing, some nearby horn. By thirty minutes in, the creaks and groans of an old ship are keeping time with the rolling drones and horn.
Of course, while listening to this in the background (and reading a great entry by Lewis H Lapham in the May 2003 Harper's), the apartment (an old 1910 unit) decides to add in its own noises. First, one of the smoke alarms has been making occasional (every 18 hours or so) chirps. I think it needs some TLC. Anyways, it chirps briefly but loudly. I go back to reading, keeping one eye towards the real clouds outside and another listening to the creeping changes in this track. It sounds like the old ship is falling apart - extra creaks and door sounds can be heard until, nearing the fifty minute mark, a bicycle bell. The creaks stop, but the drones continue. And there's something more sinister: the sound of water dropping in. Those dark dripping subterranean sounds. Around the 55 minute mark, I thought I heard a sudden (brief) new sound - like a gull or baby crying. Since there were a surprising amount of gulls flying around my window when I got home, and since the outside sounds (I forgot to mention a sudden thud which rattled much of the building, a few minutes after the fire alarm chirp) had found great timing already, I actually did stop and back up the track. Nothing. I let it go, the water was stopping, the horn was gone, and soon the drones of the bellows faded out.
It turns out there's a history to the name Mary Celeste. Originally launched under the name Amazon, she was a half-brig that apparently found itself going through many owners and accidents at sea. Purchased years later at a New York salvage auction, she was renamed "Mary Celeste". In November 1872, she departed from New York bound for Italy, but the captain, his family, and small crew were never seen again. The ship was found floating derelict, apparently missing one hastily boarded lifeboat, with no evidence of piracy or foul play. The story inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to publish a fictional short story (under a pseudonym) about a derelict ship called the "Marie Celeste". Some more can be found here and here. An excerpt of the track is available from Brainwashed. I think it accurately captures the feeling of despair on a derelict ship.
Salt Marie Celeste easily finds itself fitting in with some other rainy sit-still-and-don't-move-high-above-the-pavement day music, although it shines best in evening on such a day.
Bill Bumgarner writes:
While I have an active disinterest in Zope compatibility for various reasons, any well designed persistency solution for Python should work just as well within Zope as without.This is a design decision of Ape, and one of the reasons its name has changed (it used to be AdaptableStorage, and also the code layout has changed. I think one could start working with Ape 0.6 and start building something that didn't depend on Zope and (probably) didn't even depend on the ZODB, although the ZODB is a great persistence framework for Python on its own.
Again, the support for Zope is important to me just because I want to make sure that whatever I'm using is aware of Zope's transaction management. Also, there are issues with threads and database connections that not all designs might take into consideration. This affects Twisted as well, as it is an asynchronous framework, which puts special requirements on database access. All of these features can be met and dealt with, and I agree with Bill that a good persistence system for Python should work anywhere. There are definitely enough software patterns out there that one could write software against that transparently deal with the expectations of different environments that should be pluggable and replacable easily for new situations.
This morning, I did a more thorough reading of the design outline that comes with Ape, and I think that it could satisfy every element on my list - except one. There's still the issue of querying the data. One of the reasons we went with a relational database is the expressiveness of SQL, and the ability to tweak queries for even more performance gain. But, I'm thinking this might not be that big of an issue for one of the applications I'm dealing with, because the really complex reads are happening only on the public side of the site, and there are very very very few times when data is written to the database from the public side of the site. So I might be able to start migrating a lot of the back end to persistent objects backed by Ape serializers while keeping the optimizations and fancy queries intact for the front end of the site. The few places that actually write the data for the front end could be migrated fairly easily once the rest of the structure is in place.