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Thursday, November 27th, 2008
This is a  great movie. I'm going to need to watch it another time or two before I can really comment on it with much understanding. My initial reaction is that it's sort of like watching dada sketch comedy -- there must be good ideas in here for 5 or 6 movies, thrown together in an utterly reckless way. It would be so easy for it to suck -- but somehow it's wonderful. Malcolm McDowell wrote the screenplay (at least he said he did in the fine documentary O Lucky Malcolm!, which comes with the DVD; he is not credited as the writer) and acts lead, and is just a trip to watch. I was surprised while watching the documentary to realize that I haven't seen any of the huge majority of his films that he's done since 1982.
posted evening of November 27th, 2008: Respond
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Hope everybody is having a pleasant time. For your Thanksgiving listening, Pet provides a funny monologue from Benny Rubin, and Heebie-Geebie provides a funny monologue from Arlo Guthrie.
 We're not having our Thanksgiving till tomorrow, to make it easier for Ellen's family to get out here from Long Island; today is going to be dedicated to making pie and watching movies. We're going into town to catch the matinée of Bolt, and then tonight after Sylvia goes to sleep Ellen and I are going to watch O Lucky Man! (Coincidental trivia: Malcolm McDowell is one of the voices in Bolt. Last night we watched the documentary O Lucky Malcolm! which is included on disc 2 of O Lucky Man! -- it was really nice listening to him talking about his career, and weird to realize I haven't watched any of his movies since Cat People.)
posted morning of November 27th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
The squid Magnapinna has been photographed and filmed by a team from working from a Shell offshore oil rig. See the video and read more at National Geographic.
posted morning of November 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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Have you read Hunger, by Knut Hamsun? Tell me about it or recommend it to me? Ed told me many years ago that I ought to read this, and Norway's a little bit on my mind now because of Robyn Hitchcock's new record's title and because the weather just got so cold all of a sudden... Maybe I will check for this title next time I'm in a used bookstore.
 (Oh wait, I think the Hamsun book Ed recommended to me was actually The Growth of the Soil. Hmm... The full text of Hunger is available free at Knut Hamsun Online.)
posted morning of November 26th, 2008: 1 response
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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Here's how you can use GMail in an encrypted fashion:
- In GMail Settings, "General" tab, select "Always use https". Now every time you open GMail in your browser, the site will be loaded using SSL encryption.
- If you use GMail Notifier, download the patch to make it use https. The patch is available from Google's GMail Notifier page.
Worth doing -- it makes your email traffic less visible to snoopers.
posted evening of November 25th, 2008: Respond
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You know what debugging tool I just hate having to deal with? Purify, is what. Its interface seems insanely cumbersome to me, it's hard to use in conjunction with gdb, I dislike having to compile a separate version for heap-checking. Well today, my co-worker Nick hipped me to valgrind, which just seems like it was made for me. Exactly suited to my style of debugging. Basically it just spits out a ton of messages to stderr, interspersed with your own stderr output you can troubleshoot very quickly and come up with a bug location to reproduce in gdb. My goal is to become a power user of valgrind -- starting with no knowledge of the product I was quickly able to isolate the problem I was seeing. If I acquaint myself with it's features it's going to make a really valuable addition to the toolchest.
posted evening of November 25th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
So Wikipædia's page about Modern Times asserts that "Beyond the Horizon" is based on "Red Sails in the Sunset" by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams. I don't know the song so I looked around and found several versions of it on YouTube -- Tab Hunter, The Platters, The Beatles, Nat King Cole, Fats Domino. And more! (No idea really, but I'm assuming the Cole version is the standard.) And... huh. It's a kind of pretty song, and I guess I can see where the idea comes from that "Beyond the Horizon" takes this as its source material -- similarities in structure and topic are not hard to see. But it's not moving me to anything like the degree to which I was moved by the Dylan song. Look at this! YouTube user teclo64 created a video for "Beyond the Horizon" using Chaplin footage from The Gold Rush and Modern Times:
posted evening of November 23rd, 2008: 3 responses
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
Before the concert tonight, Ellen and I were looking around for a place to have dinner. Our idea was to have chicken and plantains at one of the many Dominican restaurants on the Upper West Side, not because they are especially great but as a way of remembering our first dinner date, at La Rosita. But as we were walking along Amsterdam, what should we see but Pio Pio! Can it be? This was one of our favorite places when we lived in Queens; we had no idea it had come to the Upper West Side. But it has; and that is the place to go if you're hungry for chicken and plantains.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2008: Respond
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(Note: lots of great pictures of the show at brooklynvegan's blog, and more from Dave Kaufman. And another review at The Song In My Head Today.)
(Update: woj has the full setlist and links to a tape of the show at Internet Archive.)
"This music is a place that cardinally does not and never has existed." -- Robyn had opened the concert with some pure music, "Sometimes I wish I was a pretty girl" playing on a tape recorder as he walks in wearing a top hat, sits down at the piano and starts playing with the tape speed. He quickly tires of that, turns off the tape and plays "Nocturne"; then Terry Edwards walks out carrying some wind instruments and they perform "Flavor of Night" together. It was kind of a somber opening, I found -- but after Robyn started talking about his music, things warmed up a lot. Captain Keegan came on stage while he was describing the process of dissecting his lyrics as similar to looking at magnified pictures of rotting tomatoes online, wasting valuable time when you could be sending e-mails, and they launched into "Sounds Great When You're Dead" -- this is 
Photo by Dave Kaufman when the dim blue lighting became bright and red, and everybody started smiling and moving. "These songs are basically subtitles," said Robyn, "they flash up underneath while life is going on" and serve as a means of translation between understanding and feeling, or words to that effect. And played "I Used to Say I Love You." He had some technical difficulties with a loose wire during this song but recovered from it very gracefully -- the final line of the chorus is "And I've lost my illusions about you now", but instead he said as his amplifier crackled and retched, "And I've... ah, really fucked up this guitar, keep it going for a minute you guys, I'm just going to plug this in really deep here,..." and came back to reprise the chorus. There was a lot of chat about editing thrown in at various points during the show, because it was being filmed for inclusion in a documentary of the tour, for instance IIRC Robyn said something about editing out that bit with the recovery from the technical difficulties. I hope they would not; that was one of the really key lovely moments in the show. (Also lovely: in the program was a chronology of Hitchcock's life and work from his POV, similar to this one but expanded through 2009.) Robyn made his first of many references to the recent election when he said of November 4th, "suddenly the scheme of things did not suck." He talked about how he wrote IODOT during the Reagan/Thatcher years when there was not much to feel hopeful about, but he had flashes of hope such as the one that led him to write this song: and played "This Could Be The Day", with "Nubian slaves" inexplicably edited to "Nubian Dave". Then Edwards gets up from the piano and takes Robyn's electric guitar, the black one with white polka dots that matches his shirt, and Robyn says "This is gonna be in C. C, the mother of all keys..." and talks for a while about key signatures and editing -- "We've just survived 8 years of faith. Let's see where a little disbelief can get us." And the three of them sang "Sleeping Knights of Jesus", with some great edits to bring the song up to date a bit. Talked for a while about railroads as an embodiment of love as an intro to "Trams of Old London", and then talked about the physical skeleton of the city, as an intro to "My Favorite Buildings". "Catholicism is best described as a form of insurance. ... Oh crap, did the Lord cut off my mic? -- It's back, someone must have given him something." And they played "Mother Church", and Terry and Tim left the stage, and Robyn played a solo "I Often Dream of Trains" on electric guitar with all of his enormous personality focused into the microphone -- this song was stunning and brought a standing ovation, one which brought everybody back out for some encores. In the encores they played a song I didn't know but which I loved, and have asked the Fegs to identify for me;* and both songs from "Rachel Getting Married" (which Ellen hopes gets an Oscar for its music); and "Listening to the Higsons". And a special extra encore, after everybody had gotten up and started moving toward the exits, of "Goodnight I Say" -- which was funny and nice, because I had been thinking before the show about how this would be the ideal closing number. Anyway: too long and too unfiltered a post; I just wanted to get some of this down while I still remembered it.
 (Oh, I forgot, something I really liked: the last thing Robyn said at the end of the first encore, and I think as all the musicians on stage were playing the final notes of "Higsons", was something like, "Things never end. But for the purposes of editing, we're going to stop here." And the sound cut off, and the musicians exited. The extra musicians playing on the encore were Gaida Hinnawi on vocals and Amir El Saffar on horn, both from the cast of Rachel Getting Married.) (Another thing I just remembered: After Terry and Tim had left the stage at the end of the set, before Robyn played "I Often Dream of Trains," he spoke for a bit about the concert ending -- "This is the needle lifting from the dusty groove" -- he likened the end of a record or concert to the transition from sleep to wakefulness, the music being a remembered dream, and the transition from "then" to "now." "But this is still then," and started playing.) *And the responding Feg says, Robyn played this song on Wednesday too (at World Cafe Live), and she thinks she has never heard it before. Which I take to mean it's a new composition.... Another Feg says, it is called "I'm Falling" and is written for the soundtrack of The Fifth Beatle. It will be track 4 of Goodnight Oslo.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2008: 4 responses
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 Ohboyohboyohboy! Ellen and I are going out to the Upper West Side and watch Robyn and the boys play I Often Dream of Trains! I've been reading reviews of the tour -- on the web and on the fegmaniax list -- and it sounds like it's going to be really great. Busy day until then -- I'm going out in a couple of minutes to run errands, and when I get back will be working on home improvement type of things until the afternoon. Sorry I haven't been keeping the blog up so frequently over the last week or so, real life has been too busy. I'm definitely planning to post a review of the concert, late tonight or tomorrow morning.
posted morning of November 22nd, 2008: 2 responses
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