Monthly Archives: March 2009

Pagan Wanderer Lu – Fight My Battles For Me

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fightmybattlesWere you to try and create a musician for me to admire, I’d think it hard for anyone to come up with anything more suitable than Pagan Wanderer Lu. A keen social commentator, multi instrumentalist and lover of melding the the slight and heartfelt sounds that sometimes typify bedroom indie to the louder electronica sounds that are so often in fashion he’s right up my street.

As part of his own publicity push for his new album (available in some good shops) he’s been making a series of videos for the songs on it. Here’s Anger Management which leads off the album.

The album is a mix of old and new, with the old receiving a lot of interesting tweaks. Of the songs that are fresh to me my favourite is (You & Me And) Winston Churchill which kicks off with a seemingly un PWL-like piano and real drums but has some of his nicely awkward lyrics

You and me and Winston Churchill
went to a rave on ecstacy
He said “these brightly coloured lights and bangin’ tunes do not one thing for me”

and leads nicely into the most awesome core of the album, as the, well, bangin’ tunes start to kick in.

The awesome Tree Of Knowledge follows, without any changes from the successful single mix and is a profusely profane ponder on er, education and stuff with many mentions of engorged phalluses. And he says vagina in it too, titter.

Startup chimes, cross the Rio de Palazzo
Boats go by, but I’m looking through the wrong window
Sentenced to life, I can stop anytime I want to
But I’ll press F5 just one more time…

2.0///The Bridge of Sighs laments the dangers of web2.0 culture and was originally featured on the limited (and damn fine) Omega Point EP, about which more when I’ll round up 2008.

Stop Traveller! Stop and Read! reminds me of the days I used to work back in a bookstore and the aimless feel you can get in your first work out of university.

The Memorial Hall pops up next in (shock!) yet another new version. At first I was slightly resistant to the new version, as for me the slow intro is fun, but it’s when the song reaches full tempo later on that it really reaches greatness. There is, alas, no video for it yet, but I’ll post it when it pops up and I’ve even sketched a bit of a storyboard for making my own video, which PWL himself appears to be encouraging.

This may well be my favourite PWL verse by some distance

Now we remember the disco
They’re holding tonight at the Memorial Hall
I hope to meet eyes with your sister
As she stands like a flower by the plaque, by the wall
But the alcohol kicks in and somehow instead
the words on the plaque just take over my head
I think I shouldn’t be dancing with so many dead
But I’m wrong

The album doesn’t end with the next track, Simple Life/Repetition but I’ll stop my track by track here as I feel these are the core tracks that really make the album work.

And if we’re all just machines
For replicating genes
Then what the hell can any of this mean?

Do go and listen to PWL’s music via the videos on his site, and if you like a bit buy the album.

Just call me swampy

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facebooknew

Facebook have updated their site design again, in what many say is an attempt to counter the growing popularity of twitter. I’m in two minds about the update. On the one hand it’s facebook’s site and theirs to do what they want with. If I want control of content, delivery and style then that’s what this blog is for (and long term readers can attest to the issues in that model). Alternatively, though, I now look like the most spamming user in the world. This is because I feed facebook from a number of sources, so all my status updates are just shipped in from twitter, links come from my delicious bookmarks and google reader shared items, images are all uploaded to flickr with a notification to facebook and my likes on youtube and last.fm are moved over as well. Also, of course my blog comes through from it’s RSS feed.

And I can see that to a point that works rather well, I have no desire to use Facebook to do all my activity on, as I’m already happily using those sites to perform the functions they’re good at. However, I also gain because by linking back to facebook I can still update my friends on what I’m doing.

Until recently these updates were much less prominent, in large part because facebook was in the habit of only showing the latest status updates or activity of each person in the news feed. Now, however, it seems happy to show multiple events from a single user on the main page, and also to show updates from a feed instantly.

This makes a user like me who feeds in a lot of content swamp their friends news feeds. I don’t like the idea of that so I hope facebook either introduce options for throttling your own activity updates back a bit. Alternatively you can hide me, but then you get nothing, which seems to defeat the point rather.

One evening of Boffinating later

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Four hours of metadata parsing later…
boffinresult
The initial look of the completed tag cloud compiled thanks to running last.fm‘s data over my music sure ain’t pretty. Thank $deity for wordle, cos they make it look far cuter.
worldledboffin
So I decided to start by listenning to the tracks at the intersection of electronic, mashup and folk. This yielded me a strange mashup of some shitty rap and Phil Collins. Well, at least it looks pretty.

Music to hold onto whilst the sky is falling

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At last, the start of posts about my favourite music I came across last year.

I’ve been listening to Kelley Polar since his first album Love Songs Of The Hanging Gardens was reccomended to me by emusic. It was nice, but didn’t really hook me but his second album I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling is quite simply fantastic and this song, Chrysanthemum is perfect.

Hushed breathing over his by now standard ethereal synth and drum machine sounds leads into a lovely intro

One white skull used to be a friend of mine
Two atoms kiss and what a funny valentine
Three more years before you’ll ever see the sun shine
I held your hand but now you’re just a fuzzy outline

followed by the chilling and evocative chorus

Make a chrysanthemum of every human head
Make a chrysanthemum and kill them in their bed

And if you haven’t quite got it, I think the video makes it nice and clear. The album is well worth a try, with a brilliant mix of modern clear production values against a sumptuous 80s sound.

All the cool kids have iPhones now

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flickr-camperaphone-graph

Yikes, this is the graph for usage of cameraphones on flickr. Last time I looked at this it was a nice and fair fight between the N95 and the iPhone. Clearly now the iPhone is far out in the lead. Which is surprising as it’s not a particularly great camera at all. What it does do though, clearly, is make it relatively easy to take photos for most people, and I guess it’s pretty unarguable that the iPhone is the most usable smartphone by some scary distance.

I, meanwhile, am remaining an uncool N95 kid and intend on maybe upgrading to an N97 when it comes out.

Snow, The London Assembly Report

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Not Coming Out To Play We’re now only a month since the TERRIFYING SNOW OF LONDON and after the inevitable Channel 4 documentary Snowstorm: Britain’s Big Freeze comes the London Assembly’s report on how (badly) London coped with the snow. There are many interesting points raised within it, one intriguing thing is that the tube was doing fine, seemingly, but not enough staff turned up. Whereas the buses got snowed in and were unable to traverse the roads safely but had a very good staff turnout:

All operators have reported high levels of staff turnout, driver attendance was between 80 – 90 per cent depending on garage locations, there are reports of drivers walking long distances to get to work, some abandoning their cars en route.

There’s an interesting point raised by TFL:

However, parts of the press consistently reported most of the lines were suspended, when, in fact, LU delivered service over approximately 80 per cent of the network, with the service delivered exceeding demand.

The tube was in fact running a reasonable service but of unusual nature that the terming of this as part closure, delays or severe delays on most lines then meant that most media reported that the tube was mostly shut.

Key also is that there was no defined hierarchy either in which transport modes, services or bus routes were considered most important to keep running with only a limited prioritisation of roads to grit. Most fundamentally the chain of command essentially snapped and the limited devolution London experiences failed to provide any strong leadership either from TFL or the mayor in large part because various agencies chose not to bother Boris or TFL and vice versa. The normal[1. and it pains me to put it this way, but I've seen it more often than snow in London] terrorist threat response of establishing a Gold command was not undertaken as the snowstorm was not seen as a major enough event.

Communications between the boroughs, the mayor and TFL were in many cases slim to non-existent. My particular borough (Hammersmith & Fulham), failed to submit anything to the committee but as this note shows

TfL received the first request from boroughs for assistance with grit supply on Monday morning, when Hammersmith & Fulham advised directly that they had run out

it was the first to run out of grit on the first morning of snow, which perhaps explains why they failed so comprehensively to grit the pavement in my street and the rest of the borough. As the report shows they even had to beg for grit from Ealing as well. This also led them to leaving the sort of nice Lyric Square as an ice hazard. Perhaps they didn’t have time to write down the complete account of their inability to make the streets safe.

I personally rather enjoyed the chaos of it all as I recounted in my earlier piece. Incidentally, I’ve been beaten in writing this post by The Londonist who’ve used the same photograph of mine. Hurrah for Creative Commons licensing, and nice snowy photos of London buses.