The Middle Years (2006-2009)

An old one, by Sue Trowbridge. The AP on mashups

Posted a whole bunch of old pics onto my Flickr page, including this one - I liked the way the track sees to recede into the horizon.

Or, Terry Schiavo plays the tuber. The Vegetable Orchestra (Das gemüseorchester) were pretty much what you’d expect from their name - music played with carrots and cucumbers turned into instruments. They’re not completely out of their gourd, but they certainly brought the fun to Jubilee Hall. The visual spectacle of the live event was just as much part of the effect - in the background were projections of veggies being sliced up, while the sound of tumbling pumpkins and aubergines was much enhanced by seeing them tumble.

The Girlfriend once referenced girish, and it turned out to be a pretty impressive film blog - well written, erudite. Take this excerpt from his piece on Godard’s Every Man For Himself, for instance:

Newsflash: Kung fu worthless against trains. (Interesting that Xinhua doesn’t use the hanyu pinyin version of “kung fu”.) Liang jumped down to the tracks and wanted to use Xianglongshibazhang, a famous kung fu posturing described in many swordsman fictions, to stop the running train.

A true kitsch classic: the Stars on 45 Medley. I didn’t realise it had a video. Featuring women in aerobics outfits doing disco handclaps!

While Harold Ramis will probably never top the virtuosity that is Groundhog Day, this black comedy of dishonour among thieves shows that he still retains the ability to capture the bleak side of a holiday.

Another picture from Bonn. Nothing special, except I thought the text (“cyclists / moped riders please dismount”) and the picture didn’t quite match. I kind of get what it means - ‘people are bringing kids here, please get off to avoid running them over’. But it still seemed a bit of a jump.

“Mony Mony” - the Billy Idol version, not the Tommy James and the Shondells original - came up on my MP3 playlist today and it reminded me of how people chant the “hey motherf***er” lines in between the lines of the verse.

Slate reimagines classic novels with pulp covers Or you could spell out the whole of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” in cookies Meat grown in a lab. On the one hand, this has a weird-science feel about it. On the other - it would solve a lot of ethical dilemmas, such as concerns for overfishing or living conditions on farms. A funny interpretation of “Sugar, We’re Going Down” and its mumbled lyrics. Meanwhile, the Iraqis love Lionel Richie. “Richie says he was told Iraqis were playing ‘All Night Long,’ on the streets the night U.S. tanks rolled into the country in 2003.”

Went to the PC show today and picked up a Brother printer/scanner/copier/fax/coffeemaker/dishwasher/okay, I’ll stop. Crowds were crazy. Seriously - if there’s an incident where Citylink Mall joins to Suntec City the resulting stampede would be dangerous. And trying to navigate through the crowd back to the train station wheeling a trolley was nuts. But all’s well etc. etc. and I finally have a working printer and scanner.

Ooh, a hamster survives 3 types of crushing machines and a shredder: Another chapter was written yesterday in the history of great hamster escapes, when a pet called Mike survived three types of crushing machine and a shredder at a waste recycling plant.

How to mouse goofy. I’ve used a mouse left-handed for 6 years already - ever since I started getting twinges of pain on the right wrist - and it’s been excellent. It’s not just transferring the pain I think - the fact is, with your mouse on the left, your hands have to travel less to reach for the mouse from the keyboard (because the mouse hand doesn’t have to travel over the numeric keypad).

Might as well start reviewing the films I watched on the inflight entertainment, starting with a light but enjoyable one, Casanova (cross-posted at Delta Sierra Arts, my reviews blog):

I of course have a personal interest in the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth, but I was also fascinated by the idea of a compelling PowerPoint presentation - I tend to hate the tool, if only because it’s so badly used so many times. (I even own a copy of Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”.) So this Presentation Zen post on Al Gore’s quality use of PowerPoint was quite inspiring as a reminder that it’s possible to use PowerPoint as something compelling - as long as one refrains from bullet points overloaded with text and information!

My friend Michelle points out the McSweeney’s “Lady Macbeth on Ambien” bit - frankly, not as funny as many other McSweeney’s pieces, if only because it wore out the joke - but that reminded me: back in secondary school, when we were studying Macbeth, my teacher played a part of a jazz recording about Macbeth: all I can remember is the tune (which I can’t reproduce in text, of course) that there was a female vocalist, and that the chorus ended with “I will not fear death and bane / Till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane”) - anyone have any inkling what this recording might be? It isn’t Duke Ellington’s “Lady Mac”.

Ah, Bonn - how fast the two weeks flew by. And more schinitzel and pork knuckles than you can swing a haxe (multilingual pun there) at.

Am reading the Financial Times, which is the hotel’s choice for an English-language paper, and they reviewed Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, the recent collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected poems. And I thought the quoted extract from “Good-Bye”, on the sadness of departure, featured very precisely chosen, exquisite words:

Just a quick one: A.O. Scott summarises the NY Times Book Review’s survey of the best American novels of the past 25 years - Beloved is, indeed, beloved, with DeLillo’s Underworld a close second. I did like the offhand reference to one of my favourite novels (which admittedly wasn’t written in the last 25 years), Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

Bonn is pretty much how I remember it - a quiet, sleepy little town, although this time I’m staying in the outskirts, which makes it even quieter and even sleepier. Had a nice meal at Tao Restaurant on Sunday, and then kept trying to figure out in my head how to say “check, please” in German.