When Stereolab released Sound-Dust back in 2001, they snuck a whammy on me. Initially, I wasn't impressed by the album, although I enjoyed a couple of songs. But when I really started listening to it more fully, I realized that it was a milestone work. It transcended Stereolab's "retro-pop" sound, no longer belonging to some past vision of the future, but being very much what I wanted to listen to right then. It also differed from their previous two albums, in that it was very orchestral and baroque while the previous ones were very precise and minimalist. More expressive chords were being used, and the timing of the instruments all had a little more slip. It was enormous, and matched by complex songs - many of which were two or three distinct songs worked together, which allowed for some amazing transitions. My favorite, in the song Double Rocker, invokes a 1950's B-movie, with its slow bongos and increasingly loud horns and organs. In my mind, I can see that Tiki door in black and white moving ominously closer and closer, afraid and intrigued by what's beyond. Of course, the other side turns out to be a hip jazz party. The whole album, which even features an orchestral send-up to a Stereolab song from a decade earlier, felt like a break-through to me. And this is from a band that's generally very consistent with knockout material.
In 2002, second vocalist and guitarist Mary Hansen died after being hit by a truck while riding her bike in London. Mary was a key part of Stereolab, with a voice that nicely complemented Ms Sadier (Stereolab's co-founder). She was usually the one responsible for the "doo wee doo wee doo wee do.... whee" little blips of voice, but would also harmonize and sometimes split lyrics with Sadier.
Following Mary's death, Stereolab returned to the scene last fall with the EP, Sudden Stars. The baroque orchestrations of Sound-Dust were toned down, and a bit of funk (initially heard on 1996's Emperor Tomato Ketchup album) found its way in to the sound. There's also some male backup singing in some of the tracks, whose lyrical content runs the gamut of precious to the very political (a Stereolab staple).
Like the Captain Easychord EP was to Sound-Dust, "Instant 0..." was a precursor to a bigger album to come. And that has come in the form of Margerine Eclipse.
Margerine Eclipse (yes, that's the album's spelling) is a stunning album - a more intimate version of Sound Dust. The big orchestrations are gone, but there are still a ton of instruments in use (as there has been since 1994's Mars Audiac Quintet). The groop pulls of an interesting trick which I've found myself doing with my own art (to a lesser extent) - combining a sort of self-nostalgic step forward. According to The Onion AV club, Stereolab's mastermind Tim Gane crafted "...Sudden Stars" as " a pastiche of old and new source tape." One of my favorite tracks, so far, is "Margerine Rock". It puts me in a very happy daydream of the Mars Audiac Quintet performing on The Muppet Show, as it's got just that sort of rhythm and energy that Muppets seem to really go off on. It sounds a bit like 1994 Stereolab at first, but adds in distortion and discordance (not unpleasantly) in its rock-out moments - nicely filling in the sound space. "Feel and Triple" is the song that's directly about Mary (in fact, starting out with the words "Goodbye Mary, Goodbye Mary"). It starts out somber, but Stereolab doesn't dwell on sadness here - instead warming it up and including some new words sun to a backup melody Mary sang on the song "Ticker Tape of the Unconscious" (from 1997's excellent Dots and Loops album). The lyrics for Feel and Triple are a beautiful message to a friend, sung and performed well by the group, and is one of the high points of the album.
The most surprising moment, for me, is in the closing track - "Dear Marge." And in Marge, perhaps we see the meaning of the Margerine spelling of the albums title (and two other tracks). The surprise is the very intimate beginning of the track. Far removed from the laboratory image that Stereolab seem to like to give in each release, Dear Marge starts off with a half second of guitar and then a voice (I'm assuming Tim's) saying "Ready?" and a count (in stereo, out of phase) into another somber song beginning of guitars and vocals (mentioning "precious dust") that lasts for about half a minute before spreading into a nice warm loungy sound that is oh-so-cozy. That intimate of a start is a nice touch. "Dear Marge" is actually about three songs combined - all good, ending with the disco closing half of Mass Riff from the Instant 0 in the Universe EP.
While a lot of the sound may be looking backwards, the content is looking forward. Some tracks are cynical (and half are in french with no translation - another 'lab staple) Cosmic Country Noir seeks to get through the violence paradox to the common ground / common space where we can all finally agree. Margerine Melodie opines "Seems that until now we have used our brain just to dominate.. We've to widen the knowledge of how our brain words to under stand or nothing will ever change." The final lyrics (as printed) from "Dear Marge" (after condemning gods and judges) are "The joy to love, to know to learn, are the essence of existence. And so couldn't these govern it too? The joy to love, to open up."
In the middle of the album, between "Margerine Rock" and "Margerine Melodie" is "The Man With 100 Cells" is all about change - the revolution is coming anyways, you're not a child any more. "The tools you've used to get by aren't the keys to your tomorrows", shifting into some sinister augmented minor chords with heavy organs and singing "Horizon is grim, Tempest arriving..." before giving you the trust and helm of your ship.
Contributing to the change in sound in this album is that Stereolab worked with a new producer. For the past seven or so years, the Groop has worked with John McEntire (of Tortoise), and in recent albums also with Jim O'Rourke (of too many cool things). This time, neither of them are present, and the album is entirely in the hands of Fulton Dingley (who has co-produced on some recent albums and EPs). A unique touch to Instant 0 and Margerine Eclipse is that they're dominated by dual mono recording, with heavily separated left and right channels, an excellent stylistic choice that I think really adds to the sound.
The old images and dreams of what the space age would be have always held a strong sway over me, and Stereolab continue to let me live in those dreams. This album continues them. As I stated earlier - there's a difference now, since Sound-Dust. Maybe the Lab's caught up and surpassed us into a new future. Maybe I've just caught up to a place where I let myself live closer to those dreams. I'm not sure what's going on, but I love that there's still music outside of my usual Avant Garde circle that can make me fill like this (coincidentally, it was working with one of my favorite artists, Nurse With Wound, that brought me to Stereolab. I'm happy to say that I did manage to grab a vinyl copy of this. And there's no end to the fun that can be had with this.
Much love must be given to the likes of Stereolab and Pizzicato Five for picking up our space age and jet age musical visions and just running like hell with them.
Joy joy joy joy joy joy joy. Not only is there a new Stereolab album today, but they have a featured page on the iTunes Music Store, and an exclusive track.
I'm waiting until lunchtime to go buy the album, for real, even though it will cost more than online (Stereolab are one of those bands whose physical stuff I have to own, sometimes in multiple formats).
Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation and just plain nonsense on the web, but a mass media that gives us Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage on a regular basis, and that devotes more coverage to Michael Jackson's legal problems than the Iraq War, isn't in a position to lecture anyone about standards.
[Billmon, Davos Discovers the Blogs]
For years, from various places, I heard strange music. With or without beats, the structure was unconventional to say the least. It started with a saturday evening community radio program - unfortunately, I never made good notes on the artists I was hearing (Crash Worship was the only one I remembered). When that program went away, I found what I could, usually in the in-between spaces of the industrial tapes I was listening to at the time. The concept of industrial music was always much more interesting to me than the actual result. I wanted (although I didn't know it at the time) Musique Concrete. I slowly found music that fell more and more into what I was searching for, but it wasn't until I came across Nurse With Wound's Live at Bar Maldoror that I finally found an artist dedicated to that sound. It was a great moment, sitting at the music store listening to that album; that sound I had been looking for for so long.
I wanted more.
There was one problem: Nurse With Wound and the few similar artists I was aware of at the time were import only, and thus more expensive than other CD's. I was eighteen and had little extra money. But I needed more. So, having long wanted to start a music/art project, early 1994 saw the birth of what is now AODL (then named Forgiveness). The first few months were the best. A lot of tape laid down. 70-80 percent of it was crap, but the bits that hit, well, really really hit. Herein lies some of the story of those first recordings, some of which are about to finally see a CD release.
Sanctity of marriage? SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE?! Are you fucking kidding me? Marriage is so fragile that it needs a constitutional amendment to protect it?
Will this amendment stop bullshit weddings like the recent Britney Spears one? There's nothing sanctimonious about that marriage. Will it suddenly stop the mammoth divorce rate? Will it protect those wonderful wholesome straight families where parents beat their children? Where spouses cheat - many times over?
I'm straight, and am personally of the opinion of Hamlet - "I say there shall be no more marriages!" - but I can't believe that same sex marriages will destroy all that is holy about marriage as spelt out in the above paragraph.
Sanctity of marriage. To paraphrase Max Shreck - "Bush. shame on you. No such thing. If my life has a meaning, it's that."
One of the new features in Mac OS X 10.3 is that when using command-tab to cycle through applications, a window pops up (ala Windows) to cycle through applications in the order most recently accessed. Prior to this, cycling through applications took place in the Dock. I didn't mind this feature, but it had a number of shortcomings. Prior to 10.2, cycling through applications went through the order in which they were placed in the dock. This made it very difficult to switch between two applications currently in use if they happened to be spread anywhere but next to each other. In 10.2, the dock was still used, but the first command-tab would go to the last used application, but from there on it was back to the Dock's order.
There were, however, some cool things you could do with command-tab in those versions. When cycling through applications, you could hit the 'h' key to hide an application (different than minimize), and 'q' to quit it. It was a quick way to clean clutter if you really wanted to focus on two applications at a time, and a quick way to clean up applications you didn't intend to leave open.
But Panther's capabilities are just the coolest, and far outdo the alt-tab feature of Windows (at least, as of Windows 2000. I don't know what XP offers):
Whoa. John Edwards looks to come in second in the Iowa caucuses.
When MoveOn had their online primary a few months ago, I spent some time comparing the different candidates, but have to admit that I didn't look too closely at Edwards. My vote went to Kucinich, even though I knew he was and would be a long shot. I like Kucinich and know he's come from an interesting background. And I have to admit that since then, I haven't looked too closely at the other candidates, partially because I knew the field was still shifting.
CNN has just projected Kerry to be the winner. Kerry is another interesting man. I have not looked at his plan/policies too closely. But the December 2003 Atlantic Monthly published a portion of Douglas Brinkley's upcoming "Tour of Duty" book about John Kerry's experiences in Viet Nam, taken from Kerry's war notes. It was a compelling read, and I'm looking forward to picking up the book. It's a really good insight into a young man serving (as an actual soldier, not as a photographer nor skipping out on flying planes in Texas) as a patrol boat operator in Viet Nam.
Now that the field of candidates is going to narrow down (slightly), I think it's time for me to take another look at the candidates. But - it is very nice to see some actual goddamn energy from the Democrats who have been so lethargic (and at times, downright pathetic) over the past few years. Stupid DNC...
While Zope 2.7 is still not out yet, the milestone plan for Zope 2.8 has been posted online. There have also been talks about Zope 2.9 floating around recently. Near as I can understand them, these are the differences:
Zope 2.7, among other things, brings a long overdue and very well done configuration and installation system. It's also officially "blessed" to work with Python's 2.2 and 2.3, although you can't store new-style classes (define in Python 2.2) in the ZODB object database. Nonetheless, just having access to non-persistent Python 2.3 goodies will be very welcome. Zope, unfortunately, lags behind Python releases, mostly due to a couple of reasons. The 'Extension Class' system, which allow for Python code to subclass from C base classes (which Python now fully allows with its new-style classes introduced in Python 2.2), makes some internal changes and tweaks to Python (as used by Extension Class subclasses and instances) to support Acquisition and Persistence. There's also the security issue. Security is a very strong piece of the Zope story, and the amount of new features (iterators, properties, etc) in Python 2.2 and 2.3 (or any major new version) can introduce potential security holes. Zope 2.6.3, released recently, and the latest Zope 2.7 beta are results of deep security audit to ensure that the new Python features would be safe to use.
Zope 2.8 looks like its primary focus is to bring in recent ZODB features and to turn Extension Classes into New-style classes. (New style classes in Python were partially written so that Extension Classes could die). The primary importance here is so that migration work between Zope 2 and Zope 3 can really begin.
Zope 2.9, as far as I can tell, is going to be the release that starts bridging the two different universes of Zope 2 and Zope 3.
My main hope is that the scopes and deliverables of Zope 2.8 remain as seen in its milestone plan so that it doesn't suffer from the schedule humor that has plagued Zope 2.7. And my other main hope is that all of this delay for Zope 2.7 is from focus and care towards making a solid release.
OSDir interviews members of the core Plone team. This is a good interview, and Plone 2 is looking really good.
One (very small) beef that I have with the interview is that they make it seem as though Zope (the software) itself is lacking. I have to differ. Sure, the Content Management Framework and Plone add a lot of functionality, but only for certain types of applications. Zope (the software) is a base system for building web applications, but there are many kinds of web applications and content management (in particular, Plone's style of content management) is only one of those kinds. From my experiences, which primarily date from the Plone 1.0 release candidates, if your applications don't fit that model fairly well, you have a lot of work ahead of you to reconfigure and rework the model to fit. Plone has grown a lot since then, and frameworks that extend it even further, such as Archetypes, make customization even easier, but it can still be way too much sometimes. But even Zope (the software) suffers from this issue, albeit less. We have come across times in our little company where the resources and overhead required for Zope were just too much for a couple of forms and their handling.
Curiously enough, Plone reminds me of the problem that Principia (Zope before it was open source) was trying to solve initially - a common product that makes it easy to bring various different application types together in a common system. Principia unified a lot of common Zope Corporation (Digital Creations at the time) products, that were themselves built on the fundamental Bobo (now ZPublisher - the cool core piece of software that turns web requests into object calls), Document Template, and BoboPOS (which became the ZODB) pieces of software. CMF seems to be avoiding some of the issues that came up that have plagued Zope in the meantime - meaning that they have more defined set of audiences in their users and developers, whereas Zope is much more of a blank canvas and tougher to define (thankfully, for me).
But overall, the whole stack (Zope/CMF/Plone) is a very powerful system. The interview provides a good overview behind the philosophies behind Plone, and what differentiates it from Cocoon and PHP-Nuke and the like.
I've finally gotten around to developing a generic caching service for use on our various Zope and data driven projects. Zope has a powerful caching system, but it's targeted at Zope application items in the ZODB. Likewise, Zope's SQL Method caching is not quite tuned to what we need.
The problem is that we often do a lot of load-time computation of RDBMS stored data to build new objects and data structures. Some of these loaders get hit quite intensively, and may span many many tables and even multiple queries. Some parts of them may not require (or desire) caching. Of course, when the underlying RDBMS data (or any other used data source data) changes, the cache needs to be notified. This has been where existing solutions have failed for us. Doing a 'RAM Cache' or SQL Method cache (its own kind of RAM Cache) on an intensive loader/reader doesn't work because there is no correlation between the data that is loaded and any other piece of the system that may update that data. This can be dealt with by keeping cache times low, but there are certainly situations where that in and of itself becomes more of a system burden.
The solution I've implemented thus far, based on a suggestion from a coworker, is for cache entries to have keywords associated with them. For the most part, these keywords map to table names, but they could really mean anything. Internally, the cache maps individual keywords to CacheEntry keys, and cache entries also keep track of their keywords. This way, cache entries can be invalidated individually by key OR by keyword. (The cache can also be swept for stale entries, which does the key by key removal which still cleans the keyword mapping).
For example, a breadcrumb builder may cache its results for a particular page (identified by some unique key, in this case it might be the path to the page in question) by associating the entry with the keywords 'navigation' and 'core_metadata'. Navigation contains the structure, core_metadata contains titles and descriptions. If the site manager changes the navigation tree, the resulting code may tell the cache invalidate_keywords('navigation'), whereas changing the title may result in the call invalidate_keywords('core_metadata'). Code that changes lots of data can invalidate multiple keywords. Aside from having to maintain a common vocabulary, which is easy in the case of relational data, this keeps a nice disconnect between the code that updates data and the code that reads it, because reads happen more often and are often more complex.
The little system has been working so far. It allows for caching of arbitrary objects (it has been pointed out to me that I just - again - said what is usually my least favorite word (arbitrary!)). Of course, once one gets into cache design, all sorts of other little things start cropping up (stale data, sweeps, etc). It really makes me want a good Zope Scheduling system.
This weekend, I obtained some new furniture. Nothing fancy - in fact, quite simple, but elegant. Just some new shelving, small tables, and this console table in the entry way where my iBook gets to hang out now as I write this. For some reason, I've always wanted a writing table in here. Maybe because it's free of the distractions of the big windows in the main area.
As a result of all this, I've reorganized my apartment. Everything is shifted around now. The place feels more homely, in place of the more stark minimalism of before, while retaining a lot of open space (and still fairly minimalist). The couch is now placed so that I can see the heart of the city from it. Actually, when all the blinds are open, I now face all the windows when sitting. It's a nice improvement.
So tonight, I could really watch the fog creep in and engulf the bigger buildings. We're trapped under an inversion in the valley, where all of the smog, fog, grime, and cold temperatures stays trapped down below while the mountains are warmer and the sky is clear. A friend and I skied Brighton this morning. On the way up, we drove through strange fogs that changed color. From the average grey to a sudden chilling blue and purple, back to grey, and then to red. But as we went up the Canyon, it wasn't long until it was clear and beautiful. I actually left a layer behind before we got on the mountain.
Riding back down, when we hit the inversion again, the bottom of the canyon was absolutely beautiful. All the bare trees were laced with frost against the backdrop of the fog. Stunning. It was almost as good as the walk home the other night from a nearby bar: the city was quiet and empty, the fog was heavy. I could barely see up to my apartment windows from across the street. The only bad thing about this all is that so much of it is pure gunk - pollution particles trapped in the valley bowl. Still, from inside, it's pretty.
Oh.. And it's damn cold.
Thanks to recent employment status changes, my old G4 that I've been using in the office finally gets to go home. This causes my old iMac to move (I have to admit, however, that my iMac DV looks much better on my home desk than this beige monitor will). I was thinking that the iMac might resume its old life as a Mac OS 9 machine, in order to run Pro Tools Free. Pro Tools Free was a stripped down but quite capable eight [mono] track version of the Pro Tools audio software. I haven't seen any decent low-cost multitrack recording options for Mac OS X, until today.
Apple's new iLife application, Garage Band, has a lot of people excited. Me too (so long as it performs decently on a 400 Mhz G3). The virtual instruments and loop features don't interest me much, but the amp modeling and multitrack recording options are great. Ever since Apple bought eMagic, I've been hoping something like this would happen. But when the Mac OS X native versions of Logic came out, there was no mention of the low end version (known as MicroLogic). Finally, it's here in quite new form as Garage Band, part of the $49 iLife suite.
Although... I hate suites. But still, $49 for Garage Band and iPhoto (the two applications I do use, although I use iPhoto for organizing film scans instead of horribly boring digital photos) is a pretty good deal.
I have to admit that, like for the holidays and many other events in recent months, my typical anticipation for the grand theatre of the Steve Jobs Macworld Expo Keynote has been rather diminished. Until right about now. Now, I'm a good bit curious.
On the other hand, I'm dreading tonight's Utah Jazz game. There's a lot of injured players on the team right now, and the game against Houston could - at best - be described as "Humiliating." Generally, this has been a fairly well rounded team, with many players contributing offensively and defensively, especially in our home court. But I have no real drive to see tonight's game. Even though the arena is only a block away and I have my [very very top row] season tickets right here.
Maybe a few beers will see me different.
The OmniGroup, a longtime Mac OS X and NeXTStep/OpenStep developer, has posted a preview of OmniWeb 5, the next major revision of their OmniWeb browser.
OmniWeb was the primary web browser for NeXTStep and Mac OS X Server 1.x (a.k.a. Rhapsody). In early Mac OS X days, I preferred it over IE 5 as a browser for reading, because it used Quartz beautifully and rendered text much better than any other browser available for Mac OS X. However, it was unusable for other web purposes, as it used Omni Groups own HTML engine that was far behind other engines. But with release 4.5, OmniGroup replaced the HTML engine with Apple's WebCore framework, which is based on KDE's KHTML engine.
So what OmniWeb offers is a browser that renders web pages as good as Apple's Safari, but with more options and control and in a beautiful interface. I'm surprising myself by saying this, but OmniWeb 5 looks like a release I'd actually pay money for. Some of the new features include:
It's been reported that OmniWeb 5 will have a new status bar which will detect certain aspects of a page, including RSS feeds, and present icons with special actions for what it detects.
It's nice that Omni Group no longer has to worry about maintaining their own HTML and JavaScript engines, and can instead focus on the application. This gives Mac owners looking for a more advanced and controllable web browsing experience than Safari (intentionally kept simple) an excellent option, as the Mozilla based browsers for the Mac are either awkward (non native UI) or have fallen woefully behind in their maintenance.
Ahhh, the new year. Welcomed in, as always, with style. This included:
Now I'm just waiting for the hangover to finish clearing in hopes of seeing more Naomi Watts in 21 Grams. While decompressing, more new AODL is being recorded.