Category: Musical Snobbery

Gigantic

So there was just a new Apple ad on TV. One which grabbed my attention with an unmistakeable baseline…

My first reaction was “Holy crap! That’s Gigantic!! Awesome!”. My second reaction was “Uh… do Apple realise what that song is actually about…?”

If I may be allowed to be blunt, the song Gigantic by the Pixies is about a cock. A big black cock. A gigantic black cock.

I don’t know if that’s meant to be a hint about some kind new Apple product, but if it is, I don’t think I’ll be buying.

Good ad though.

Faith, Cheese and Anime

The old black dog is biting a bit hard at the moment, hence the general lack of updates. But I thought I’d jump in and post this remarkable chart…

The Evolutionary Chart of Religion
The Evolutionary Chart of Religion

Click to enlarge and all.

You obviously can’t sum up the entire scope of human spirituality in one simple diagram, but it’s still a fascinating attempt.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, here’s a few things I promised Paula I’d link…

* Where’d the Cheese Go?
* Smoke Week Every Day

I’m so sorry…

Later: Oh! I also promised to link these stories from Hyperbole and a Half. No need to apologise for these, they’re great! 🙂

* Dogs don’t understand basic concepts like moving
* Wild Animal (The Simple Dog goes for a Joy Ride)

Musical Tuesdays – Tom Cruise’s G-String

Three weeks without a Musical Tuesday. Dreadful!

So I happened to catch the start 0f the Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx vehicle Collateral the other week and was extremely impressed with the version of Air on the G String that featured.

Air on the G String is a 19th century arrangement by August Wilhelmj of part of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. By messing around with the key of the piece Wilhelmj was able to play it entirely on the G string of his violin, which is kind of unfortunate because if he’d made it fit on the A string it’d have a lot less potential for awful puns.

In any case it’s a wonderful piece and the Klazz Brothers somehow manage to turn it into jazz without damaging it in any way.

And while discussing the Air, one can’t go past Procul Haram’s A Whiter Shade of Pale (1967). The entire song draws from Bach, but the memorable organ line leans particularly heavily on the Air. The song was a massive hit and was voted joint best British pop single since 1952 in 1977 (along with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody).

So that’s it for this week. Enjoy!

Musical Tuesdays – Soundtracks

I bought a new TV.

This isn’t as much of a sybaritic indulgence as it may seem, as my old TV was on it’s last legs. And when I say ‘last legs’ I mean that if I wanted to watch something I had to subject myself to the following baroque procedure…

1: Turn on the TV.
2: Wait for around 12 minutes as the screen changes via almost imperceptible stages from black to bright white.
3: Enjoy 15 minutes of an image appearing on the screen for half a second, followed by a loud ‘crack!‘ sound, and the screen going to black for ten seconds before the cycle repeats.
4: Once the cracking has stopped and the picture stabilised, turn the TV off, because there’s no sound.
5: Turn the TV back on, which will hopefully restore sound.
6: Actually watch any TV.

While I’m not the most demanding guy when it comes to creature comforts, having to turn my TV on a good half hour before I want to watch something was getting kind of wearing, so I splashed out and bought a brand new unit. A 40 incher would you believe, which is mostly because I screwed up the maths and thought it was somewhat smaller than it actually turned out to be.

Such a large screen has taken a bit of getting used to – more than once I’ve caught it out of the corner of my eye of an evening and been momentarily shocked into thinking that Adam Hills was actually in my apartment. But now that it’s settled in and gathering a fine patina of dust, it’s all good.

As I was making such a large purchase I decided to spoil myself with an add on and bought the box set of Misfits as well. Misfits has been one of my favourite shows for ages, but I’d only ever seen the first two seasons. I knew of course that the subsequent seasons aren’t meant to be as good – in no small part due to the absence of Nathan – but decided to give them a go anyway. To date I’ve watched all of season three, and will shortly move on to season four.

So, what did I think?

Season three, in my considered opinion, was OK. It’s definitely not the same show. It suffers for the lack of Nathan and the new powers everyone ends up with are really rather naff. There’s nothing that can be described as a story arc across the season and the whole thing lurches around from episode to episode with a complete lack of point or drive.

There’s also lots and lots of death. In the first two seasons someone getting killed was a big deal – much of both seasons revolved around concealing the bodies of the characters’ inadvertent victims. But this season people are dropping like flies and no one really seems to care. I suspect it’s actually deliberate self-parody, but even if that’s the case it’s a big change from the serious drama of the first two.

That being said, there’s a lot of entertainment to be had. Newcomer Rudy is both a terrible, terrible human being and a riot. The elements of self parody, although jarring, are fun. I was also surprised at how moving I found the conclusion of the Simon/Alisha/Super-Hoodie story arc in the final ten minutes of the season – it was like a sudden return to the tone of the original show, and was really rather epic.

So, what has this to do with Musical Tuesdays? Well, soundtracks my friends! Soundtracks!

Here’s to my mind the best bit of music from Misfits…

Not bad eh? When I first heard it I wondered if it was by Murray Gold, but it’s actually by Vince Pope.

On the subject of Murray Gold, here’s one of his best pieces, from the soundtrack of Doctor Who.

For my money the best bit is 1:40 to 2:37, but frankly the whole thing is pretty wonderful.

Well that’s it for this week. I have Titans to build and lightbulbs to change!

Musical Tuesdays: Paranoia

Music can make you feel happy. Music can make you feel sad. Sometimes it can make you feel both. And on occasion it can make you feel like the walls are closing in.

Many years ago I was at a friend’s place who had recently splashed out on an extremely powerful subwoofer for his stereo system. To demonstrate it he asked for all of us coming over that day to bring a CD or two (this being back in the days when the CDs was the music storage medium of choice). I remembered this instruction at the last minute when heading out the door, and grabbed the first random CD I found to hand.

Also attending the christening of the subwoofer was an individual who had earlier on indulged in some, shall we say, less than legal substances. Once the power of the subwoofer had been adequately demonstrated by almost shattering the loungeroom windows, we put on the CD I’d bought with me, at which point our slightly worse for wear friend quickly became quite twitchy, and begged us to turn it off, because it was “making him paranoid”.

The song in question?

Yes. Seriously.

I had a rather twitchy experience myself recently when I stumbled over Phillip Glass’s soundtrack to the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi. The first time I heard the main theme I had to turn it off, because it sounded like the most lifeless, frightening and downright evil music I’d ever heard. It resembled the droning of Satanic monks on their endless rounds through benighted, lightless catacombs, deep under the earth, where the twisted bodies of the uneasy dead have long mouldered into dust. Or the tramp of a million workers trudging into a factory where the corpses of unwanted children are systematically rendered into ash.

After a few re-listens I can now tolerate it (no damn song is going to beat me!), but I can’t say I like it much. That said, plenty of people do, some even calling it “soothing”. I wonder if that says more about them or about me?

Finally (and with nothing to do with paranoia) I stumbled over Chvrches’ cover of Bela Lugosi’s Dead today. I really don’t know what to make of it. Getting a bunch of synthpoppers to cover a Bauhaus track is like hiring Andre the Giant to play a Munchkin. There’s nothing wrong with Andre the Giant, but he’s so at odds with the role that the end result won’t be anything like it should. Judge for yourself…

Or perhaps you might prefer this version?

Over and Out.

Number Crunching

Had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes,
She sat around and counted them all a million times,
— Cab Calloway (and many others) – Minnie the Moocher

It occurred to me this morning, just how long would that take?

The first thing to establish is just how many coins would a million dollars in nickles and dimes add up to? A dime is ten cents, so a million dollars worth of dimes would add up to 10,000,000 coins (which incidentally would weigh 22.68 tonnes). A nickle is five cents, so a million dollars worth of them would be 20,000,000 coins (weighing 100 tonnes). We don’t have any information on exactly how Minnie’s cash is divided, but we can average it out and assume that she has 15,000,000 coins to count (weighing about 61.34 tonnes – better hope that gold and steel house she got from the King of Sweden has reinforced floors).

We can make a not unreasonable assumption that it takes about a second to count a single coin. Furthermore over the course of counting 15,000,000 coins Minnie would probably get pretty good at it, so let’s assume that it takes her only half a second per coin. This means that to count the whole lot would take Minnie 7,500,000 seconds. This is 2,083.3333 hours, or 86.8 days – assuming that Minnie takes a whole bunch of stimulants and never sleeps. It’s actually more reasonable to assume that she spends only 8 hours a day counting coins, so she has time to enjoy racing those horses and riding around in her diamond car.

Taking that into account, counting all the coins once would take 260.41 days, or 0.71 years.

That doesn’t seem too bad – but remember, she counts them a million times. To achieve this Minnie would need to spent eight hours a day counting coins for 713,001.49 years.

Poor Min indeed.