Month: June 2002

Fuck it. I have no real idea what I want to say in the meltdown ont he WEF. Three attempted posts and still nothing. It jumped from 14 to 314 between views, I’ll go for 600 by the morning and I’ll post then when I can drag some thoughts together.

I just bought 5 albums.

Not bad considering I spent some time today downloading a lot of music eh?

Well lets see earlier this afternoon I was downloading some Pearl Jam, it was in fact a cover of Sunday Bloody Sunday…or at least it was suppose to be but it wasn’t. It did remind me however that I really liked their live versions of Last Kiss, so I downloaded some of that. I was in Tower Records this evening and I was thinking about the stuff I had downloaded and it struck me that I don’t own a single Pearl Jam album. Quite a hole in my collection. Like many bands that won’t sorta below my radar when I first got into music (and I’ll get to them in a moment) I had no idea where to start. Loads of albums and I don’t know what I should buy. So I was having a browse and in something that surprised and impressed me, they released a cd of if not all, most of their concerts from the 2000/1 world tour. You could get cds of London, Glasgow, Paris, Stockholm, New York and many many other places. How great an idea is that? So 10 minutes later I’m leaving with the double cd of Pearl Jam live at The Point Dublin 2000. Guess what I’m listening to now?

I’d never have picked that up if I hadn’t downloaded some of their stuff this afternoon, I would never have thought oh hey I have no Pearl Jam. That’s £16.49 I wouldn’t have spent on a cd. You don’t hear much of that do you? Its all stealing music, loosing us money and cd sales and royalties etc etc.

Well here is my take on that. My love for Napster (and the various clones these days) is simple. Live tracks and live cover versions. That’s what I download, if I want an album I’ll go out and buy it. Simple as that. If I could go out and buy an album of The Smashing Pumpkins live that included their covers of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday and Stay I would, in a second. Were I able to go out and buy a cd with Michael Stipe (from R.E.M. fame) singing lyrics to U2’s One with music by Radiohead, hell I would get up early and be at the door when the shop opened. U2 are a fantastic band live, I saw them at Slaine last year and it was one of the best days of my life, their songs just lend themselves to live performances. Over 80,000 people singing along just adds so much. Being able to go somewhere and get my choice of my favourite tracks from various gigs over the years just plain rocks. To be able to have the entire of U2 live from Croke Park Dublin in 1987 a click away is fantastic.

The same goes for R.E.M., Metallica, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and many many more. I mean I have Alanis Morrisette doing a cover version of Radiohead’s Creep, R.E.M. covering The Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t fear the Reaper, JJ72 doing an acoustic version of their own track Snow from a festival in Japan and the list goes on. You just can’t buy this with money. It really is as simple as that. If you could, I would pay it.

This afternoon for the first time in a long time that I can remember I was really excited about music. I was listening to some of the best bands in the world signing some of the best songs in history and at one stage I was so tempted to just start singing along in the office. Guns N’ Roses doing November Rain so nearly brought that out. Walking home from the bus stop tonight was just a whole musical experience.

Guns N’Roses, Nirvana, Pearl Jam have all got one thing in common for me, I first really heard them all when I was working in Dublin about 3 years ago. Someone had put some MP3s on a Mac I was using. I heard them and they blew me away. I got into music far later than most people seem to do. I was in my mid teens (i.e. mid nineties) before I really got into it. They slipped me by like so many others that I am still only discovering. At the time Napster was just beginning to take off and around the call centre it certainly did. Day after day we downloaded music and ran servers and it was pretty much the musical education of my life. Previously if it wasn’t in the Top 40, or played lots on MTV it just escaped me. Fuck me did I miss a lot of great stuff. As a result I bought albums by loads of bands that I had just never thought of buying or indeed even heard of before.

Anyways tomorrow I’m going to download more and I’m not saying I’ve never and will never download a non live track because it would be a lie.

I can say that in complete honesty that downloading an mp3 has ever stopped me
buying an album.

I can also say in complete honesty that downloading an mp3 has caused me to buy an album, and I can say that quite a few times.

Just some thoughts on the matter….

In today’s news, it was overall a good day. First thing this morning I got a new toy to play it. It’s pretty, we like it and approve. I will be making some alterations to make it better and yes is annoys me that I have to repeat some work but I’m going to enjoy it and I’m going to enjoy the final product a lot too.

I got paid at last so today was shopping day. I picked up some music (see a whole post coming on that in a mo), a couple of DVDs (Bullitt and The Evil Dead) and some comics (Ultimate Spider-Man III, 100 Bullets 4 A Foregone Tomorrow, JSA: Darkness Falls, Sin City: Family Values, Sin City: Booze Broads & Bullets and Road to Perdition). I also picked up Warren Ellis’s Available Light, a collection of photographs and prose which I am looking forward to reading.

And yes I know, I’m not exactly the best person at birthdays and other occasions. I owe three seperate people birthday presents (and one of them is my sister) whats even worse is I owe one person 2 birthday presents (yes that means what you think it means). 1 should be sorted out and the last part is finally being shipped to me so that should go within a week. The other, the double present is put together and sitting on my bedroom floor, just need one more piece. I will get a box this week and get it shipped. The other it looks like I’ll be delievering in person in a week or so. I am really shit at things like this, I’m sorry.

Ah an acoustic version of one of my favourite songs of all time; Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls and two live performances downloading now.
How fucking cool is that?

I was just thinking the other day that I missed Napster a lot. Not anymore I don’t. Win MX seems to be just as good and is getting me some damn fine tunes, right now we have REM doing a cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”. I suspect there will be a long post on the subject later tonight…and about a couple of comics.

What a wicked game to play
To make me feel this way
What a wicked thing to do
To let me dream of you

Anyways Win MX is currently rocking my world. It works through the firewall and I’m getting back all the old cover versions and live tracks I use to have. Nevermind stealing music, I can just go and get a copy of U2 and REM playing “One”, or Radiohead doing a cover of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, thats why I love filesharing.

U2’s classic “One” with vocals by Michael Stipe is just a wonderful sound. Its such an amazing tune and Stipe’s vocals just go so well with it. I’m loving Win MX. This time I have a cd burner on my desk, man am I about to start using it. I love the internet, I have no idea how I would survive without it. Right now Pearl Jam are playing “Smells like Teen Spirit” live, fuck me this is what music is about.

Most weeks I have lunch with Iain a couple of times, we wander up to Hammersmith and find somewhere to grab some food talking about various things. Its all good. Today I wanted to have a quick look in a couple of shops so I dashed up to the “mall” and ended up just grabbing a quick McDonalds, nothing but the healthy option for me. Anyways as I was walking out I ran into a friend I haven’t seen in a few weeks which was good, just a very brief chat but things like that are good. To run into someone you haven’t seen in a while in a completly unexpected place.

Iain found these on tube maps over the weekend and took the photos using his snazzy new digital camera. Arn’t these cool?

A couple more here

is currently kicking my ass. I’m on the fourth mission, Arnhem Knights and its damn tough. I seem to be able to get to the last quarter of it but fuck does it kick my ass. The review does call this level grueling, I can see why. I’ve beaten two levels a day for the past two days playing on and off. I’ve spent quite a while at it tonight trying to beat it and not getting anywhere.

I’ll get back to it later in the week. Tomorrow is payday and therefore new comics day. There is just something right and something wrong about spending a couple of hundred on the day you get it. Ah well I can deal.

If no-one else cares, neither will I. Not a good attitude and not a good position to get into to. In fact it fucking sucks if you’ll pardon my French. I asked earlier “Why should I”? well isn’t the fact that no-one else does good enough, well no its not the one simple reason is because it matters. If we are going to let all of the little problems slip by pretty soon they are going to add up and they are going to cause a major problem. So how am I going to fix this, what will I do to solve this which is not my problem? Well, I can’t fix it directly…that’s not true I could go in and do it now and you know that idea has a lot of merit but I suspect in the long run that would be a bad thing to do.

So given there is no formal method of moving forward on little things like this, I’m gonna cover it another way. It is within my purview to ask for something to be tested to see if it works as expected and hell I can also define what is working as expected. Nice huh? So that’s the plan I’m going to note all of these and I’m fucking well going to make sure that someone else notes them down aswell and then lets assign the fuckers to them to fix them.

A good plan yes? No, its a shit plan and its not really the way anything should work. (Something is broken, you should just tell the person responsible and then they should go fix it. Unfortunately the real world does not work like that, in fact it just plain does not work.) But its all I have and I’ve gotta work with what I have.

World Leader Pretend by R.E.M.

I sit at my table and wage war on myself
It seems like it’s all…it’s all for nothing
I know the barricades, and
I know the mortar in the wall breaks
I recognize the weapons, I used them well

This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the wall, and I will be the one to knock it down

I’ve a rich understanding of my finest defenses
I proclaim that claims are left unstated,
I demand a rematch
I decree a stalemate
I divine my deeper motives
I recognize the weapons
I’ve practiced them well. I fitted them myself

It’s amazing what devices you can sympathize…empathize
This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the walls, and I will be the one to knock it down

Reach out for me and hold me tight. Hold that memory
Let my machine talk to me. Let my machine talk to me

This is my world
And I am the world leader pretend
This is my life
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It’s high time I’ve razed the walls
That I’ve constructed

It’s amazing what devices you can sympathize…emapathize
This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the walls, and I will be the one to knock it down

You fill in the mortar. You fill in the harmony
You fill in the mortar. I raised the walls
And I’m the only one
I will be the one to knock it down

What is it with online communities and the need to drive themselves apart? Its almost always about rules, at the end of the day the buck stops somewhere and someone somewhere makes the rules. Someone doesn’t like them and it goes from there. I have more thoughts on this, they are not coherant so I will refrain from posting them.