It was warm here yesterday and I decided that we needed something that could be cooked up without heating the kitchen too much. I headed to the grocery store.

This kind of trip is often a disaster for me. I wind up wandering around the store coming up with ideas that will not work together. Ultimately I get frustrated and leave hungry or I buy enough food for 50. For whatever reason, though, I actually came across food I wanted to buy: Bison inside-round medallion steaks. They looked like filet mignon, looked super-tasty and looked quite reasonably priced.

The question became, what to serve on the side? I generally feel that you need at least two things on the side — more is better. I wandered to the produce section and found local corn on the cob… quite good looking despite it being quite early in the season. A large vidalia onion and a yellow pepper called out for tasty grilling. Then I got lazy and grabbed a bag of pre-washed organic romaine and a jar of light organic caesar salad dressing. A box of local organic grape tomatoes caught my eye as well.

Of course I wound up overgrilling the steaks a bit. (I use a meat thermometer and was aiming for around 145°F for rare-ish, but even a meat thermometer won’t help you if you leave the grill to check your email…) The steaks weren’t beyond well-done though, so the meal was still super-tasty — with a glass of red wine to wash it all down.

 › food     2005-07-29 18:10   ...0 comments

Another set of Bank Street construction comments

Read the Complete Entry

 › letters     2005-07-15 11:30   ...0 comments

Details here (or download the ad here in quicktime format).

 › funny     2005-07-14 13:10   ...0 comments

Sat in the library at Carleton this afternoon and decided to have a closer listen to a song that May and Dan put me on to during their last visit. It’s by Imogen Heap and it’s called Hide and Seek.

So I listened to it a few times and then decided to put it on single-song repeat for a while to kind of figure it out. I listened to it for quite a while in the background as I reviewed data and made graphs. I checked the iTunes play count and it was 23 by the time I turned it off (93 minutes or so). So you could say that I extensively checked it out I guess.

Needless to say it is a very compelling track. Not exactly ‘cross-format focused for airplay success’ but something along the lines of what Negativland had in mind when they described a song that had been designed. I don’t know if Imogen Heap did design it, but that’s the effect I get. And I must say that I am not using ‘design’ in a pejorative sense at all. It’s a small miracle of craftsmanship.

The song itself is just over four minutes. And it’s almost impossible to pin down something that it is like. Not because it is totally unlike anything you’ve heard before, but because it is self-contradictory in so many ways. That, I believe, is one reason it is so fascinating.

The song is solo voice accompanied by rich vocorder harmonies. This makes it immediately reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave. After this point, though, we have to start into the contradictions if we want to discuss this song any more.

This is a real christmas tree kind of track. It is jammed full of tweaky effects, and is wildly inconsistent. One minute we have large concert hall reverb, the next the room is dead. There is exactly one industrial hammer sound in the 4 minutes. One minute we have bright (almost painful) treble-rich pop EQ, the next we have mid overload: muddy distorted vocorder. This inconsistency should make it really bad. It makes it really good.

The metre of the song is also contradictory. On a casual listen it seems to be what hymnodists would call ‘Particular Meter’. Meaning basically that the metre of the tune is custom-matched to the metre of the words; in other words it wouldn’t fit into the traditional scheme of having a book of tunes and a book of words and picking an appropriate pair. It also seems like it’s kind of ‘not in time’, very flowing, very expressive, and — while very rhythmic — totally irregular. That is how it sounds on a casual listen.

Now I have this thing that May and Dan will attest to that I hear songs in different metres than normal other people do. I thought perhaps it was just me when I began to hear the piece in 4… But I patiently counted out the whole track. It turns out that the casual listen I talked about in the last paragraph is wrong. The song of contraditions. The irregular metre is not the truth as the song is actually an extremely consistent 4/4 (roughly 120 bpm) from first beat to the rit at the end. It is heavily misbarred, which is another common quality of old american hymns. Misbarred songs have the metrical emphasis on the wrong beats. They are misleading because it sounds like you’re jamming a beat here and and stealing a beat there, but when you look at it closely they’re plain old 4/4 or whatever. Imogen’s singing is expressive for sure, and she pulls a couple of beats around, but that’s style. As Shelley once said, there’s writing and then there’s singing.

The thing is that even when you know it’s in 4, the song (particularly around the Hide and Seek part) just wants to be heard as expressive, free of metre, almost like the rhythmic but metreless cadenza in opera. Despite this and the relaxed performance, all the rests are counted. The production of the multiple vocorder tracks probably necessitated this.

Harmonically the track is sticking to its contradictory guns. We go from 2 voice wide open unschooled harmony to (I didn’t count) 4-5 voice crunchy close packed stuff that even gets jazzy. What kind of song is this anyway? No answers from the harmonic world… I almost want to write this song down to try to figure it out. (Unlikely to have time anytime soon though in case you were thinking of asking.)

Despite its massive harmonic structure for a pop song, it is begging for at least two more parts. I hear a deep bass (perhaps doubling some of her low notes), and there is definitely a descant super-high part in there. Actually she gives us 4 notes of the high part at one point, but I hear a lot more of it.

The thing is, if I put in all the things that I’m hearing in this track it would become a lumbering overstuffed mess. It seems to be precisely the things that are misssing that enable it to survive. The reason I said the song seemed ‘designed’ is that I find myself cued to “imagine in” these missing parts, and I think that’s another reason that it is so compelling.

In keeping with my “I never listen to the words” behaviours I haven’t commented on the poem, but it is clearly as varied as the tune. Each part of this song is over so fast — you kind of want it to keep going the way it was going for a few more verses. It’s almost as if there’s a whole album of music compressed into this one track if only you let your brain expand the verses of each section out… pretend you’re listening to five smoothly interconnected 30-second samples of songs and that’s kind of what this song does without sounding like it isn’t one song. So weird. So compelling.

The song can be had from the Interweb’s usual warez spots and the iTMS. But I think I’m going to buy this person’s album, just to see if this track was some kind of divine intervention or whether there’s more than four minutes of this kind of coolness.

 › music     2005-07-14 00:47   ...85 comments

PhoneValet Message Center 3.0 (with my our new web access PhoneValet Anywhere and our new PodCasting Bundle) has just won the coveted MacWorld Best Of Show award. That’s the second year running for us. Looks like the last few weeks of hard work have paid off.

 › technology     2005-07-13 17:12   ...1 comment

We dropped off our keys at the old place tonight. Since I have got my iBook back I was able to record some of the lovely waterfall/space invaders music that our old fridge made. I have to filter out some of the compressor sound, but I think I got around 4-6 minutes of the good stuff. Hee!

On another note we saw a great acoustic guitar concert tonight. We bought two CDs.

 › music     2005-07-08 00:01   ...1 comment

I think that I would like, someday, to do some kind of artistic exploration of empty spaces. Not new empty spaces, but very old ones. A series of photos of empty apartments. Dusty cobwebs in the corners, the old fragments of wallpaper behind the rads and maybe some still life elements… items forgotten that hint at the life the place once had. If these walls could talk and all that.

We went over to the old apartment today to get rid of the old boxes in our basement room and generally do the last stuff we needed to do there. Whilst there I had planned to go upstairs and have a walkthrough of the old place, generally to say goodbye.

Apartments are a bit like people to me… like good friends. I am extremely picky about living spaces. They have to feel like home; if they don’t feel like home right on day one then they never will. I’ve been lucky to find homes that spoke to me, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in each one. Leaving each has been a sad experience. The booming echoey sounds, the crackling floors reverberating as you walk around, the memories of things said and done, paint applied, upgrades and work put in, social occasions, the company of friends, love, fights, sorrow, joy, good food, the list goes on.

With these kinds of thoughts on my mind I did go upstairs when we did the box recycling tonight. It was a bit of a shock. Heavy spray painting equipment filled the kitchen (whose quirky and weird-but-loved green linoleum will be torn out and replaced by hardwood).

I hadn’t expected it to happen so fast… Our pleasing dark blue bedroom is white. So is our light blue office (we didn’t like that colour, actually, but when we bought paint to cover it we discovered we had matched the shade exactly). The taupe living room is white. The hall is white. The bathroom is white. Not only are the rooms white, but white paint is violating the green linoleum near the baseboards and the windows of the office also have a fine white misty coating. (Not a stellar job. Our apartment deserves better.)

No one has torn up my ethernet cabling. They just painted it white… Now it joins all the other strange items with coats of paint — my contribution to the future’s past, I guess.

I wanted to walk through our apartment one more time. To see and to remember. I went upstairs to say goodbye to my friend, but my friend had already gone.

 › domicile     2005-07-05 00:03   ...1 comment

Someone pinch me. G8 heads on brink of climate agreement.

Apparently the G8 are going to agree that science tells us that the climate is changing and that fossil fuels are a big part of it. Bush is claiming to be doing something. I know I am tired but this is a weird hallucination.

There must be a catch in all of this, right?

ETA: “My hope is — and I think the hope of Tony Blair is — to move beyond the Kyoto debate and to collaborate on new technologies that will enable the United States and other countries to diversify away from fossil fuels so that the air will be cleaner and that we have the economic and national security that comes from less dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Bush said.

So it’s pie in the sky then…

 › environment     2005-07-03 22:59   ...0 comments

Well, after the excitement of getting ready for our housewarming party and its successful execution yesterday we were ready for some serious chilling out today.

Jen discovered that some adequate movies have poked their heads up out of the sand. Accordingly, as part of our relaxation plan we watched Howl’s Moving Castle.

I have to say that I was very impressed. These review things always seem to start with a vapid plot summary, so here’s a go at one: The story (adapted from an English novel) follows a girl (Emily Mortimer/Jean Simmons) who becomes embroiled in the struggles of a young recluse wizard (Christian Bale). As they battle their separate demons together they discover that the important things in life are only to be achieved by living it. Wow… that was pretty content free.

The film was directed by Hayao Miyazaki, who gave us Spirited Away a few years back. That alone should place it high on your list for summer movie-watching. (The English translation was executive produced by John Lasseter of Pixar, and the western voice talent was directed by Pete Docter who also directed Monsters, Inc.)

The story is a good bit more western-familiar than Spirited Away (which was all the more powerful for its weirdness) but it really is a charming story, filmed in charming big-eyed anime-style Japanese animation. It follows the fairytale form, but without the emphasis on the “good” guys and the “bad” guys. Plus it has a wicked moving castle, so how can you top that?!

Ok, so this may not be much of a review, but I am telling you to see this movie because it was made by fantastic filmmakers who are living up to their names. You will like it. Ok?

 › movies     2005-07-03 22:29   ...1 comment

This article says that Canadians spend over 20 hours a week (on average) watching television.

I have absolutely no idea where I’d find 20 hours a week to do anything!

    2005-07-02 00:59   ...0 comments