I notice, because I am the kind of weirdo who is up at this hour programming his hard disk video recorder (get one now, trust me), that BBC2 has four hours of stuff between 2 and 6 this morning which looks rather good. Cross-cultural music stuff, in fact. Orchestral players put into weird (for them) scenarios like playing with, and in, a gamelan. I've always loved a good gamelan, ever since I went to see one in the Oxford University collection of musical instruments. A girlfriend at the time, even more of an inveterate cultural explorer than myself, persuaded me to go to an open day where we sat in the sun in a North Oxford garden and heard all sorts of amazing stuff played. I am not, however, going to spend four hours tonight listening to the cool stuff on BBC2. I considered it, but my energy is low and I have to rest. I could have recorded it, but I continue to drown in a tide of neat stuff - books, records, the better telly, films, podcasts. It goes on and on. What I need is focus. It's got past this stuff being valuable, and now it's about fitting it in and discerning. Funny how the world changes.
And just a thought. I love a good mash-up, confluence of cultures, hybrid or whatever one cares to term it. But surely we have cross-pollinated almost everything by now? Listeners to the better electro/dub/etc will know what I mean. I don't know that the dilution this brings is an unalloyed good thing. Not that I'm sticking heavy rap rhythms under everything I can sample in GarageBand of course. Not me.
Sometimes it's better to hear stuff in its original context, after all. Discuss.
Photography is slow at the moment here. Having bought the cumbersome but wonderful Nikon digital SLR, I find my little Olympus Stylus compact a bit pants - especially the epic shutter lag which is the Achilles heel of the model. I always have the Olympus with me, and it's great for that, but I had become used to going out with the Nikon when I was angling at getting some pics. Nothing wrong with this modus operandi, but in the process I have shagged - not literally, although I love it so, the auto-focus standard lens on the Nikon. So it's time to Jessop it, breathing a sigh of relief that I paid an extra sixty quid for a cover-all extended warranty. Inconvenient.
Home recording is going well on the Mac, although neither of my electric guitars is particularly well set up it seems. Odd how this sort of thing jumps out at one when a rattle appears in the midst of an atmospheric piece. Never mind, I have another to collect. Being laughably cheap, I can pretty much guarantee that it will trounce the more expensive stuff and cause me to wonder why I bought all that in the first place. It's an unwritten rule of instruments. At least I'll have something decent to record with while I polish my many regrets.
Just finished "Shakey", the Neil Young biography. It's a great piece of work. I love Neil's music, but I'm now very glad I don't have to work with him. Although he places a high premium on ineptitude and under-rehearsal in his cohorts, so I'd probably be in with a good chance.
Also trying to consolidate data between systems and platforms at the moment. Easier than it sounds, assuming you just thought "easy". Why is there no MS Money for Mac? I don't want to carry 15 years of my intimate finances around on my XP laptop, and I think it's a little ludicrous to have an entire desktop XP box running purely for this purpose. And yes, I thought about emulation. Ugh, sl-o-o-o-o-w.
Time for bed, said Zebedee. Hilarious cat pictures
here and
here.
