ALex Hopmann     

May 2005 Archive             

May 29, 2005

Music- Pixies, the Crystal Method DJ set and Sasquatch

I had a chance to catch a few shows the last few days. The Pixies are touring again and Kat and I went to see them in Portland Thursday night. They scheduled two shows at 6:30pm and 10:30pm and billed the early ones as "B-sides and Rarities" and the late ones as "The Hits". Because of this it sounded like the shows would be different and we bought tickets for both. The airplane was in the shop so we had to drive and left town around 3pm for the long drive in miserable traffic- it certainly reminded me why I love flying.

On the way Kat had a copy of Rolling Stone and it had a little tidbit of an interview with Frank Black where he mentioned that the "b-sides and rarities" thing was an idea that the promoter made up without really checking with the band. When he looked into his old B-sides they mostly sucked. So we were a little uncertain what we were going to get.

When the band came out for the early show it initially looked like a good start as they began with a song that wasn't part of last year's tour and is one of my favorites- Alec Eiffel and then followed with Planet of Sound both from Trompe le Monde. Since I'm a big fan of that album this looked like it was potentially going to be a great thing. But then they did a few other stranger ones and it turned into a fairly normal set. At the end of the night the earlier show wasn't at all more "rarities" than the later one- they were just two pretty typical shows with typically different set differences although they have added a few new songs to their repertoire (including the Sad Punk!!! and a cover of Stormy Weather). Both shows were good, but the early one was a bit lower energy (both the band and the crowd) and the sound in the venue (the Roseland theater) sounded like it was coming from inside a trash-can.

Kat had a theory that the band was just not trying all that hard but I suppose I still had hope.

Friday night we went to see the Crystal Method do a DJ set. We got there really late since we hadn't gotten much sleep Thursday night and our after-work nap ended being a bit long. All in all it was pretty disappointing- they weren't really spinning and it mostly seemed like they were just playing some tracks from their new mix CD "Community Service II".

Finally Saturday morning we woke up and headed to the Sasquatch festival.

I was really happy that we managed to get there in time for the beginning of the Bloc Party set- they had persistent equipment problems but still the sound was better than Coachella and they are pretty great. A record store there was selling their CD inexpensively so I picked it up and the band happened to be signing stuff so I actually got it signed (I don't usually go in for that stuff). I was wearing an old Blur t-shirt and the singer mentioned that he owns the identical shirt.

After Bloc Party was Jem which was kind of disappointing and Ray Lamontagne (I think I actually took a nap durng that set). Then was the Arcade Fire that I had seen do a few songs at Coachella and had found to be not that great- there they just seemed like a jumble. This time I thought the set was great- while I think they are maybe somewhat over-hyped it was very fun an the band really got into everything and had a good time with it.

Next came up Wilco- I guess its just not my kind of music but I find it to be fairly boring songs without much of a hook each ended by some formulaic guitar-wanking. Kanye West was ok but didn't have that much material and kept playing other peoples songs and just sort of talking over them. I don't get the big deal- I've seen a ton more talent hip-hop acts.

After Kanye was Modest Mouse- I can't believe I hadn't seen them yet but they were great and it seemed like they would be amazing in a club. And finally the Pixies headlined. The whole day the schedule had been running about 20 minutes late and the Pixies had a long setup (I suspect that with a Portland show the night before getting out at 1am they hadn't had time to sound-check before the setup for the other bands at 11am). The show was fun, but despite the long sound-check they kept having problems and they just kept screwing stuff up (not the equipment, they got the timing messed up of just blatantly flubbed the intro of songs, etc). I don't know if they were drunk or tired or fighting or they just didn't care but they were not on the top of their game. In the end while they had an hour and a half time slot they barely used 1:15 of it and they started late and actually ended before the target end-time of midnight. A very short set and only one encore (ok, the encore thing is dumb, but the short set is disappointing).

I've been resisting it because of over hype but I do plan on checking out the M.I.A. album-

May 26, 2005

Books- PHP

We are doing some fun stuff with PHP in the next version of Network Magic and I want to do some reading to understand what its all about. I've been collecting some book recommendations (and throwing in something about SQLite too while I'm at it)-

Also- a quick follow up on the previous post about the re-mastered versions of the old Cure albums. I got "17 seconds" yesterday and I haven't had a chance to really A-B it yet, but overall it comes across as a bit of a louder mix with the initial drum on "A Forest" being quite a bit more crisp. I haven't had a chance to listen to the 2nd rarities disk yet, so I'm still holding out judgment on whether it was really worth the extra ~$20 and whether I'm getting the others.

May 24, 2005

Movies- The Aristocrats

I ran across the Seattle International Film Festival guide and it reminded me why I was disappointed by "The Aristocrats"- the guide says "With: George Carlin, WHoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Robin Williams, Jon Stewart, Trey Parker" yet of those guys the only one who really did a proper version of the joke is Trey Parker (via Cartman). It goes on to say "Now 100 superstar comedians share that dirty, offensive joke with you"- but again it was only 3 or 4 of them that actually told the joke and maybe 96 others made the same comments about it.

I've been wondering a bit about why the joke wasn't told as many different ways as I expected- were the comedian's reluctant to be caught on film saying something so out there? Or were the tellings just not different enough to be interesting so they edited them out?

May 22, 2005

Music

I just heard about this DVD (and I think there is a CD) that has what sounds like some awesome performances from 10 years of Glastonbury festivals over the years.

I've also noticed that the Cure has a bunch of remastered old stuff which looks interesting but expensive-

May 21, 2005

Movies- The Aristocrats

I went to go see The Aristocrats last night. This is a "documentary" by Paul Provenza and Penn Jilette which interviews tons of the most famous comedians about this obscene underground joke that has been told for decades. The best way to get a feel for the joke is to google for "The Aristocrats South Park" and check out the South Park interpretation of the joke (don't watch this clip at work under any circumstances). In any case I was really looking forward to seeing this movie since I really enjoy pushing these kind of boundaries and the political statement around the first admendment rights to free speech.

Overall the movie itself was really good but not quite as cool as I was hoping. The highlights were when they actually had some great comedy minds telling the joke in extended versions- Gilbert Godfried's version at the Friar's roast, Bob Sagat's (!!!!) and the South Park versions were the best, although some other ones like a mime version, and various people telling it to their babies were also funny. Unfortunately they got too fancy with the editing and with the exception of the South Park clip kept interrupting all the performances with cuts to people talking about the joke and its implications. Yes, I get that the punch line is incongruous with the filth of the central part of the joke. I got that the first time I saw it, not to mention the first time you had someone famous tell me that, and it really got boring by the 20th time someone was observing that.

Some of the variations on the joke were pretty fun, but overall the film was missing what I had really been hoping it was- more of these great comedy minds each trying to one-up each other with the degree of filth and shocking acts they can describe. It feels like many of the greats like George Carlin, Robin Williams, Eric Idle, etc, held back with the cameras rolling and didn't have the guts to try to beat out Bob Sagat (!!!) and the Trey Parker/Matt Stone South-Park combo.

In a fun coincidence, my TV recorded the Penn & Teller Bullshit! episode this week on profanity.

I noticed in the latest issue of Wired that there is a cool folding bicycle from Puma, although it looks very expensive ($750). With the summer approaching I need to scope this out since with an airplane its really handy to be able to actually fly to some remote airport and bike to the nearby hiking trails- usually they are a few miles from the tiny airport and its too inconvenient to walk or get a ride.

May 7, 2005

Music- Coachella

Once again the best part of Coachella was discovering cool bands that we had maybe heard of some but didn't know a lot about. The big discoveries of Coachella day 2 were the DJ Miss Kittin and the band British Sea Power.

Sunday we were pretty lazy and got to the show a little after 5pm. I watched most of the Futureheads- they were good and I'd check them out again but nothing about them really stood out as that unique. After their set was done I headed to the dance tent where Miss Kittin was spinning. I could tell things were pretty cool when I got there and Kat was really dancing. We stayed for the whole set and danced the whole time- I'm really looking forward to her visiting the west coast again sometime soon.

I sort of wanted to check out Junkie XL, but it seemed more interesting to browse some different stuff. We wanteded over to see The Arcade Fire and they were really disappointing. The music seemed all over the place and didn't really have any hooks or anything to keep my attention. By this point the Gang of Four had already wrapped up so we didn't really have a chance to catch the end of that so we grabbed a bite to eat and went to line up for New Order.

New Order came on the stage and they were frankly very disappointing, even with the low expecations I had. They did a few Joy Division songs which were fairly cool, but still with lower energy that I thought they should be. Then I noticed that Bernard was using a tele-prompter for his own lyrics! This went a long way to explain the general low energy and disinterested approach to the whole thing. I tried to get photos of the tele-prompter, but this is the best I managed (its the thing under the drums right in the middle)-

Next we went to see British Sea Power over at the outdoor stage. They were really exciting and were just about the opposite of New Order. They were dressed up in wacky clothing, clearly into their tunes. There was this guy in the back who played the keyboards and sometimes was playing a big portable drum. At one point I hadn't noticed he was off the stage and suddenly I hear some drumming from over to my right and there he was marching through the crowd. Later on during the finale one of the bandmembers climbed way up the side of the stage and was hanging from the rigging.

After them was the Faint, another band that had been on the top of my list to see. Their set was great although almost a little too polished- every song had a video backdrop that was 100% synced with the song. Still fun stuff, and a good vibe. I had been thinking of leaving during their set to catch the beginning of The Prodigy but they were so good I stayed around.

Finally we finished the night with The Prodigy. All my friends bailed on it and concluded that they sucked (listening to the show from outside the tent) but I went for it and headed up front. There was actually a surprisingly good amount of space to dance and while they weren't deep or anything I still thought it was a fun time. Its true that they were more into weird posing than actually doing anything musical, but for a nice high energy cap to the day it did the trick for me.

So that's it for Coachella 2005. All in all a very well run event and I'll probably be going back next year no matter what acts are signed up- the thing I've really learned is the headliners don't matter that much and that Goldenvoice is doing a great job bringing in a great diversity of new music.

May 7, 2005

Computers

I keep meaning to write up my thoughts from day 2 of Coachella but haven't gotten around to it yet. Hopefully tomorrow.

In the meantime I got a new Dell printer. I was buying a new computer from Dell with a great discount on the whole system and they gave me a frequent offer of a free printer. I know the deal here is that they give away the printers cheap and then charge you for the ink, but when I saw for an extra $150 I could get a full all-in-one printer (the Dell 962) I decided to go for it.

It took awhile for the printer to show up but so far I'm very happy with it. It seems unnecessarily large (I imagine you could build the same functionality in half the space) but the scan feature is pretty cool. You just put a bunch of pages in the sheet feeder and tell it to scan and it sucks them all in and turns them into PDF files that include OCR support so you can select and copy/paste the underlying text (while still seeing the base scan without it getting messed up by trying to display it using the normal computer generated text).

I've decided to experiment with scanning in all the paper bills that I still get so I can get rid of them. I tend to be a pack-rat and keep around those sort of things unnecessarily, but if I scan them all I can ditch them. The only flaw so far is that it doesn't have support for scanning two-sided pages so I need to feed the other side back through and the PDF I end up with is out of order.

The other trick of course is that managing this stuff once I've scanned it in is a total mess. Hopefully this is the kind of thing that future version of Network Magic can tackle- although for customers of our current versions its probably a bit hard to see the connection, we really do want to deal with all the sorts of problems that people have dealing with their network and files at home and this does fit in.

May 1, 2005

Music- Coachella

Yesterday was Coachella day 1. We got there medium-early but the lines to get in the gate were crazy long and we just barely got in as the Raveonettes were starting (unfortunately we missed Radio 4). They were great although their newer stuff has a bit more of a "pop" feel to it. Still very cool.

After the Raveonettes we headed over to M83 which Gustav had described as a French cross between tecno and shoe-gazer. They were better than I expected and actually pretty damn cool. I'm going to check into their albums when I get home.

Next we headed over to the dance tent for a bit and DJ Marky was spinning but it had a crazy fast beat that was hard to appreciate. After a few minutes there we checked out The Kills who really sucked- two guys with a click track one playing some wacky guitar and the other trying to sing like Axyl Rose. We didn't stay there long and grabbed a snack and headed back to the dance tent to check out Tiga. My brother said he saw part of the Stereophonics set and I wish I had seen.

Next UNKLE (James Lavelle) was on in the dance tent which was pretty cool. He had a few tracks he did with Ian Brown. We saw the very beginning of Josh Wink who is a DJ that Nick and Kat had seen a long time ago. Then we left for Weezer at the main stage. Weezer was ok at first but it was just hard getting into it from like a mile away and their newer songs were pretty boring. We bailed after 20-30 min and headed back to the Mojave tent to check out The Secret Machines. They weren't that interesting and we were a bit tired to we just sat down for a snack and then got a great spot for Bloc Party. I thought Bloc Party was great but Kat wasn't too into it, but I'm planning on checkig out their album sometime soon. We left Bloc Party early to get a great spot for the Chemical Brothers.

The Chemical Brothers were a great end to the evening. I was surprised that in the middle of the tent we were still able to have enough room to dance. The Chemical Brothers were fun, but there were a few spots that were the more "uplifting" songs that were somewhat boring.

All in all a great day and we are all really tired. There is an interesting debate about whether this was better or worse than last year. Today's lineup is somewhat less interesting than yesterday's but we will see how it works out.

The fine print- Not much fine print for this website.