Looking Out To Sea

Friday night was another of Radiohead’s gigs on Glasgow Green. Many years ago they brought a whole tent to the green. This time it was just a stage, so we all stood outside in the rain.

It seems to be the done thing for doors to open a very long time before anything happens on stage. It was four and half hours between doors open (4pm) and Radiohead taking the stage. I’m pretty sure if they cut that time in half there would be fewer drunk, antisocial jerks in the crowd, throwing drinks over people and knocking each other over.

The show was really good. Ben tried to memorise the set list but I don’t know if he succeeded; here’s one on a fan site. The wonders of the internet! They played everything off the new album except House of Cards, which happens to be one of my favourites.

The support were Bat for Lashes — very good. Kind of Björk with darker music. (I’m assured Björk can be very dark but I’ve never heard her do stuff like this.) Give the album Fur and Gold a listen.

I mentioned in a previous post that Citylink were really rubbish when I tried to book transport to Glasgow. Well, not nearly as bad as when it came to putting on the transport. I paid for special “event” tickets, which would theoretically bus us from Edinburgh to Glasgow Green and then back again afterwards. The bus took us to Glasgow’s main station on Buchanan Street, so we had to make our own way across the city (buying an A–Z in the process). After the gig there were no buses to be seen so we went back to the bus station, which was chaos. The drivers insisted there were buses waiting empty at Glasgow Green but it’s pretty obvious why they were empty — because nobody knew where they were. Being a ticketed event there was only one entrance/exit to the Radiohead show, but wherever the buses were parked it wasn’t in front of this entrance. Nor were there any signs to tell you where they’d be parked. I felt quite embarrassed for convincing our friends that the bus would be better than the train, considering it turned out to be slower, more uncomfortable and not as advertised.

I mentioned that Helen bought REM’s new album Accelerate last week. It’s been a while since I’ve said this but I’m really enjoying their new stuff. For a start — and this has proved to be a good sign in the past — Michael Stipe is angry. His lyrics have bite and his singing does too.

Peter Buck and Mike Mills have given up farting around with their E-bows and keyboards and started making some loud noises with their instruments again. There’s real distortion on some of these songs! Angry chords! I’d say their current style is an amalgam of Monster, Automatic for the People and Up in all the good ways: political, loud, tuneful, energetic and alive.

It’s so good to hear them back on form again. We’ll just politely pretend that this is their first release since Up and all will be well.

Helen dragged me into Fopp yesterday — kicking and screaming I was! — and I ended up buying three CDs.

• Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Mogwai). The ‘gwai’s soundtrack to a film about a footballer. Okay…
• Third (Portishead). Their new album, which I’d completely forgotten was being released. I previously failed to get tickets for their tour.
• Hvarf-Heim (Sigur Rós). A double-album with some new recordings and acoustic versions of older stuff. I’m a sucker for acoustic recordings, so I had to get it for that reason.

Also Helen bought

• Multi Kontra Culti vs Irony (Gogol Bordello). Apparently all the cool kids listen to this. All I know is that it has a couple of tracks from Wristcutters: A Love Story, which is a really great film.
• Accelerate (R.E.M.). I had no idea they had a new album out. I’d more or less written them off after the last two disasters, but apparently this has been getting impressed and relieved reviews from other people.

Now, how long until the Scarlett Johansson album of Tom Waits covers comes out? ;-)

This evening we saw Helen’s mum sing with the Garleton Singers at St Cuthbert’s — they did some Brahms love songs, there was a piano duet by Schubert, and then after the interval the all-conquering Carmina Burana. It seems you are allowed to sing about drinking and hot sex in church, as long as you do it in Latin.

I enjoyed this one more than previous trips to see the Garleton Singers. It really helps to know the tunes so we’ve been listening to some of the Brahms in the last couple of days. And of course everyone knows Carl Orff, right? He appears in enough football/car/deoderant adverts.

It was pretty rockin’ anyway, and the reprise of O Fortuna had a little extra excitement because the timpanist’s music kept falling off the stand. But, quite frankly, if you play timpani and don’t know how O Fortuna goes then you’re doing it wrong. She just kept playing through…

Pretty soon now, Helen should be putting up photos of last night’s tea. It was just as good when we finished it off with mayonnaise for lunch today. This evening we had pasta and salad with broccoli leaves in it, which was also pretty fabulous.

In other news, I was very annoyed to find that Apple had intentionally broken DAAP compatibility with other music players when they released iTunes 7. I had a brief moment of delight when I realised I could communicate with Helen’s laptop for music exchanging fun — only to realise that I couldn’t. So I have resorted to using mpd instead, because it’s awesome.

At the moment I am reading another crazy Peter Høeg book, The Woman and The Ape. I’ll probably be finished it in another day but it’s looking pretty good so far. After that, I’m looking forward to The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford. It looks like a great deal of geeky fun. I really hope it lives up to its promise.

Musically I have been tied up with Michael Hedges after receiving Beyond Boundaries, a compilation of some fantastic and moving tunes. Hunt it down like your guitar virtuoso life depended on it.

I am looking forward immensely to watching Battlestar Galactica when Helen gets back.

I’ve been listening to MovieWeb Soundtracks at work, as a source of music of reasonably predictable quality. It’s free except from the adverts that appear every two or three tracks. I wouldn’t normally include listening to adverts as part of the cost — I generally just zone them out — but these ones are so dreadful and obnoxious I have to remove my headphones for a minute while they last.

There’s a particularly horrible one that I’ve heard too many times:

“My daughter came home from school today and said:”

“Can we get candy for my valentine?”

“Wow! My little girl’s first valentine — but then she said:”

“Mom, I have 32 valentines.”

And then goes on to say how “Valentine candy” is wonderfully cheap at Walmart. Is that not just horrible?

I spent last night trying to find a music player that would do what I wanted. I didn’t think I had extremely complex or demanding requirements.

1. A music library that can be loaded and queried quickly.
2. A music player that can cope with the standard Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files.
3. An organiser to sync the library (or a subset of it) with my portable MP3 player.

It seems number one is still beyond the abilities of most people who write these programs. Banshee reportedly has O(1) library loading in an experimental branch, but the remainder offer O(n). And n doesn’t have to get very large before you notice quite a slowdown. Exaile seems the best of the ones I tested, but really it’s just the least worst.

Everything I tested managed number two pretty well. But then, they’re music players, they should at least be able to play music files.

The third feature I want was a massive failure on all fronts. They all recognise my player as an external disk, but then they want to index the damn thing which takes forever. Rhythmbox actually hangs for some five minutes on startup (no UI response at all) until it’s finished loading all the tunes from my MP3 player — something I didn’t even ask it to do.

Exaile doesn’t actually hang while it’s indexing my player’s HD but it gives no indication that anything is happening. But five minutes later it pops back with a full list of everything on the disk. It won’t really let me sync though.

Banshee seems the best for syncing audio between different places. At least it seems to have the kind of options you’d need (manual updating, full automatic syncing). Shame it crashes stupendously when you hit the sync button, eh?

So I don’t have anything better than before. I use Exaile here because its library is pretty fast. I use Rhythmbox at work because it was the only one installed by default and it doesn’t demonstrate much slow-down with only two albums in the library. I have nothing to sync the contents of my on-computer library with my portable player. There are a bunch of separate applications that do this job for iPods but not for anything else, as far as I see. Pretty disappointing.

Check this one out:

Thanks for the CD, Liz! And now for some Bach:

I’ve not updated in a few days because I can’t get my laptop to connect to the wireless setup here at Helen’s parents’ house. I know what the password is, but there seems to be some painful problem with DHCP and Network Manager, where the latter ignores the former. Either way, I haven’t been able to work around the problem so I’m using Helen’s laptop instead.

I am still full of the cold. Every day when I wake up I have to empty my head of snot anew. I bet you’re happy I told you that.

And while I’m on the topic of computing complaints, I’m annoyed at ISPs for obfuscating the settings they require to get email working. They seem to think a series of screenshots showing the configuration procedure on a 7-year-old version of Outlook Express would be useful. It is not. Even if they do provide a “at a glance” page of login requirements, they always euphemise the actual requirements, so that none of the settings match up with the hundreds of options in your mail client.

At the moment I’m listening to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant covering Tom Waits’ Trampled Rose. Very nice album.