Obligatorycounterramble
Wow, three full years of integrated non-destruction. It was integrated, right? Good to see you got at least a new appreciation for Radiohead out of it. Although Doon and I seemed to get the same result in less time at our particular daycare institution. But we didn't get iPods, so it all balances out.
What's this "no more batbroadband" talk now, Ted? That kind of stuff leads to madness! Next thing you know, you'll be getting work done.
The Radiohead cover stuff sounds intriguing, so I headed for amazon and used some blunt instruments to pry a few sample clips out of the site and play them using the bizarre OS that some lunatic commie installed on this PC.
After three notes of No Surprises, I had a most disturbing flashback of a hotel elevator outside Boston. It even brought back the shiny brass sign with the words "Shoes and shirts required in lobby". Luckily the clip was over before anyone could tell me what kind of day to have, sir.
Probably not the best choice of track, given that the point of that one is that it's an elevator music melody. Talk Show Host, for example, seems to work much better, afaict through the mushiness of the clips. Lemme screw around with my interwebnet for a bit and drop a mail.
RIAA Radar even suggests it would be defensible to buy one of the two CDs. Why yes, now that you ask, I do happen to have a greasemonkey script for integrating that with amazon.
String quartet Weezer I can do whithout, though. Or any kind of Weezerage, for that matter. I can't think of any Coldplay track that wouldn't happily flog dairy products. Just add some smiling kids, a sunrise, and leave to stand at room temperature until sickly. These are things we must agree to disagree on. (Did I see the word "intelligent" associated with Blink-"Santa Claus will rape your dogs"-182 back there? And don't give me any of your irony crap, either..)
The Discovery of Slowness is one of the very few books I'd gratuitously read again and again. Perhaps not in English, though - I do remember that translation being so bad it made me want to do one of my own. Hey, wouldn't it be neat if I could do that without being sued into the ground? Who knows, maybe I'll live long enough to see the copyright expire. Unfortunately for the DoS-induced Nadolny fan, there doesn't seem to be any more where that came from.
The God of Impertinence is good in theory: Take Hermes, send him out into the world after being locked up for 2000 years, let him run around commenting on stuff and causing trouble in sundry amusing ways, then run into a couple of other gods, one of whom happens to be the guy that locked him up 2000 years ago, and throw in a love interest who may or may not be a goddess herself, and may or may not know this, and may or may not be in a coma and dreaming the whole story. In practice, it doesn't work. At all. Occasional nuggets of coolness buried in piles and piles of randomness and shredded splinters of plot. I'm willing to admit the possibility that the book makes some kind of sense if you know a _lot_ about greek mythology and whatnot, but to me it looks like he just gave up halfway through and published his notes.
There's a thing called Netzkarte in German, which is ok, but that doesn't seem to have been translated. It's a slightly autobiographical quarter-life-crisis thing, about a dude who aimlessly rides trains around Germany while he figures out his life. Entertaining, but nowhere near DoS. I think Netzkarte was his first, followed by DoS. After that it was the Hermes mess, and Er oder Ich, which rehashes the theme of Netzkarte with an older guy, and falls down in a heap in pretty much the same way as the Hermes thing.
So as not to be completely negative, and speaking of string quartets, let me add An Equal Music (spoiler warning on the Publisher's Weekly review) to your pile of recommendations. Tortured violinist in tragically doomed love affair, with interesting stuff about music and musicians thrown in. It's a big improvement on A Suitable Boy - the fact that it's about one third the length pretty much sums up the difference.
Nice hat.
What's this "no more batbroadband" talk now, Ted? That kind of stuff leads to madness! Next thing you know, you'll be getting work done.
The Radiohead cover stuff sounds intriguing, so I headed for amazon and used some blunt instruments to pry a few sample clips out of the site and play them using the bizarre OS that some lunatic commie installed on this PC.
After three notes of No Surprises, I had a most disturbing flashback of a hotel elevator outside Boston. It even brought back the shiny brass sign with the words "Shoes and shirts required in lobby". Luckily the clip was over before anyone could tell me what kind of day to have, sir.
Probably not the best choice of track, given that the point of that one is that it's an elevator music melody. Talk Show Host, for example, seems to work much better, afaict through the mushiness of the clips. Lemme screw around with my interwebnet for a bit and drop a mail.
RIAA Radar even suggests it would be defensible to buy one of the two CDs. Why yes, now that you ask, I do happen to have a greasemonkey script for integrating that with amazon.
String quartet Weezer I can do whithout, though. Or any kind of Weezerage, for that matter. I can't think of any Coldplay track that wouldn't happily flog dairy products. Just add some smiling kids, a sunrise, and leave to stand at room temperature until sickly. These are things we must agree to disagree on. (Did I see the word "intelligent" associated with Blink-"Santa Claus will rape your dogs"-182 back there? And don't give me any of your irony crap, either..)
The Discovery of Slowness is one of the very few books I'd gratuitously read again and again. Perhaps not in English, though - I do remember that translation being so bad it made me want to do one of my own. Hey, wouldn't it be neat if I could do that without being sued into the ground? Who knows, maybe I'll live long enough to see the copyright expire. Unfortunately for the DoS-induced Nadolny fan, there doesn't seem to be any more where that came from.
The God of Impertinence is good in theory: Take Hermes, send him out into the world after being locked up for 2000 years, let him run around commenting on stuff and causing trouble in sundry amusing ways, then run into a couple of other gods, one of whom happens to be the guy that locked him up 2000 years ago, and throw in a love interest who may or may not be a goddess herself, and may or may not know this, and may or may not be in a coma and dreaming the whole story. In practice, it doesn't work. At all. Occasional nuggets of coolness buried in piles and piles of randomness and shredded splinters of plot. I'm willing to admit the possibility that the book makes some kind of sense if you know a _lot_ about greek mythology and whatnot, but to me it looks like he just gave up halfway through and published his notes.
There's a thing called Netzkarte in German, which is ok, but that doesn't seem to have been translated. It's a slightly autobiographical quarter-life-crisis thing, about a dude who aimlessly rides trains around Germany while he figures out his life. Entertaining, but nowhere near DoS. I think Netzkarte was his first, followed by DoS. After that it was the Hermes mess, and Er oder Ich, which rehashes the theme of Netzkarte with an older guy, and falls down in a heap in pretty much the same way as the Hermes thing.
So as not to be completely negative, and speaking of string quartets, let me add An Equal Music (spoiler warning on the Publisher's Weekly review) to your pile of recommendations. Tortured violinist in tragically doomed love affair, with interesting stuff about music and musicians thrown in. It's a big improvement on A Suitable Boy - the fact that it's about one third the length pretty much sums up the difference.
Nice hat.
posted by cron | 2:34 p.m.
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