I had missed the release of her second album, Big GRRRL Small World in December, so I’ve been catching up on it this week. It’s more laid back, and features more of her singing than rapping. It doesn’t have as many immediately catchy tracks as Lizzobangers, but it is growing on me.
Films seen:
Deadpool: I watched this on my own because it’s a 16 certificate, and Pathe cinemas don’t allow under-16s in for those even if they’re accompanied by an adult. Honestly, there was nothing in Deadpool that I would have minded Alex or Fiona seeing, but that probably just says as much about me as a parent. It’s an irreventant and fresh take on the current superhero movie era. Apart from the long flashback, it’s a straightforward revenge story. Ryan Reynolds was born to play Deadpool, but we all knew that.
Zootopia is one that Fiona and I did go to see together. Non-essential, but fun.
Creed is amazing. Great story that echoes but doesn’t ape the original Rocky. Intense performances from Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan, and some very clever editing and effects around the fight scenes. Loved it. Want to go back and watch Rocky again now.
I’m up to the middle of season 9 of Criminal Minds now. After the highs of season 7, season 8 was weaker. The villains were less inventive and less sympathetic, the recurring plot elements (especially the cognitive interviews) felt repetitive and predictable, and the opportunity offered by the introduction of a new team member (Dr Alex Blake) was wasted. Apart from her history with Erin Strauss, she was blandly functional.
Netflix NL made season 5 of The Walking Dead available the other week, and I’ve just finished watching all of it. Season 6 is still airing on TV, so I guess I’ve got a while before I can catch up to it.
Over the voorjaarsvakantie the other week I played Firewatch by Campo Santo games. It’s an ambitious dialogue-based game that is hard to talk about without spoilers. The graphics are stunningly beautiful, but marred by disruptive drops in framerate when the PS4 failes to keep up. The story veers from tense thriller to painfully emotional drama in the blink of an eye. The character dialogue is outstanding. The radio chats between Henry and Delilah are intimate, funny, and show a complex friendship developing. You feel part of the relationship. But I didn’t like the ending. The game tries to sell you one thing, and it delivers another. The thing it delivers isn’t a satisfying pay-off for the atmosphere the game spends several hours developing. I can see what they were trying to do. Ultimately, I don’t think it worked, but I applaud the attempt, and I would love to see more games like this.
I’m on part-time leave this week, and I’m doing a bunch of scanning and archiving. Mostly paper documents that have been accumulating in hanging folders for the last ten years. I’m finding the app PDFScanner to be invaluable. It makes it super easy to scan a batch of sheets, do OCR on the text, and save them as a single searchable PDF. The process would be a lot faster if I had a proper document scanner, but I’m making do with the Epson Perfection V600 flatbed I bought a couple of years ago. Once I’ve done the initial bulk scan, I’m not going to be scanning dozens of documents a day. It’s fine.
I’ve also cut down the other bookcase in my office to give myself some more wall space for posters and pictures, and I’ve been sorting through piles of “stuff” with the following in mind:
Every day, throw something away.
Just because you have it, doesn’t mean you have to use it, or even keep it.
This is all building up to one day being able to finish organizing and digitizing our boxes of 35mm photos and prints. Despite what I thought at the time, the APS format has one key advantage over 35mm in the digital era: it’s easy to ship a small box of APS camera rolls to a third party for scanning. Our 35mm negatives and prints are all over the place. It’s going to take some effort to gather them all together for sending them out in the first place. I don’t have that in me yet.
In the meantime, I did come across and individually scan a couple of relics from the 1990s: my first RBS security pass from when I started work there in 1996, and a souvenir business card for my character Beck from Ambercon UK back in…1995? Might have been 1996. Either way, some 20-ish years ago.
I can remember my RBS staff ID (2368390), and my CompuServe user id from back then (100272.2327) as clearly as my mobile phone number now, but I don’t remember exactly which AmberCons Abi and I attended. (I’m sure Abi will remind me.)
I remember reading about AmberCon UK while I was working as a clerical assistant at the HCRC (Human Communication Research Centre) in early 1994. (Surfing usenet in my lunch hours, in a terminal window on a pizza box Mac LC.) I think we went to the one in 94. I’m not sure if that’s when I first played Beck, though. The business card would have been a souvenir for the con after the first time I played him, and brought him back as a recurring character. So either 95 or 96.
PS: I also found myself describing to Fiona this afternoon what a “photo negative” is.
Not only does United Airlines require a set of security questions — which security experts have literally been advising against for decades now — but they actually manage to weaken the secret question system itself by not letting you choose your own answer. You can only pick from a pre-approved list of answers:
Erika Hall on Surveys “In tort law the attractive nuisance doctrine refers to a hazardous object likely to attract those who are unable to appreciate the risk posed by the object. In the world of design research, surveys can be just such a nuisance.” Or, you know, A/B testing. I’ll stop there.
Jonah Peretti is Chelsea Peretti’s older brother. Huh. Makes me want to go and watch some Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Given time travel, Jonah Peretti should totally be played by William Fichtner in the movie of his life. Huh. Makes me want to go and watch Grace Under Fire, which is where I first saw him.
So this is what Ze Frank is up to now. Huh. Makes me want to go back and watch some episodes of The Show again.
“The hunger mood” by Michael Graziano. It took me the best part of a year to get over craving bread and chocolate. (Not necessarily together.) I’m still working on the rest.
Dave Winer: Anywhere But Medium. The more interesting the post is that I read on Medium, the sadder I feel that the writer doesn’t choose to publish it on their own blog or site. I understand why they do it. I’m just disappointed that the open web has failed to provide a decentralized solution with at least an equivalent experience.
I’ve been listening to School of Seven Bells since 2009. Their song “Half Asleep” was one of my favourite tracks of that year. I hadn’t been following them closely, though, and I didn’t realize that co-founder Benjamin Curtis had died in 2013. Their new album SVIIB will be their last. It’s a wrap-up of recordings made in 2012 before Curtis’s death, and polished to perfection in the time since. Alejandra Deheza’s statement on their home page:
Friends, Benjamin and I wrote this record during a tour break in the summer of 2012. I can easily say that it was one of the most creative and inspired summers of our lives. What followed was the most tragic, soul shaking tidal wave that life could deliver, but even that wouldn’t stop the vision for this record from being realized. This is a love letter from start to finish. It’s the story of us starting from that first day we met in 2004, and that’s the story of School of Seven Bells. So much love to all of you. Thank you for being a constant light in our lives. This record is for you.
The album was only released here in the Netherlands on Friday, but they release the opening three tracks, “Ablaze”, “On My Heart”, and “Open Your Eyes” early. I’ve been listening to them for weeks, and they’re stunning. “Ablaze” is a soaring power pop masterpiece. The looped chant that runs through “On My Heart” haunts my waking hours. And I swear that “Open Your Eyes” will be used as the go-to soundtrack for heartbreaking departure and hospital montages in romantic/tragic films and TV shows for years to come.
I haven’t watched any films in the last couple of weeks, which is a rarity. I have, however, raced through season 7 of Criminal Minds, and have just got started on season 8. I’m enjoying it, while at the same time being concerned about how it normalizes the idea that law enforcement can and should have every detail of people’s lives at their fingertips. Phone records, medical histories, sealed criminal records — it’s all available for techno-oracle Penelope Garcia to query and correlate whenever the hunt is on. The show doesn’t question this at all. That’s fine, because it deliberately chooses to address a different set of themes. But every now and then it’s worth taking a step back and realizing that Criminal Minds is actually a dystopian dark fantasy, rather than a present-day police prodecural.
Issue #14 of Sex Criminals was disappointing. The script spun its wheels, and even talked about spinning its wheels in a comedy meta-sequence in the middle of the issue. The punchline didn’t make up for the missing heart of the narrative. Zdarsky’s art felt hurried, with less attention to detail than normal. Hmm.
I got Rise of the Tomb Raider for my birthday last year, and finished it last weekend. It’s a gorgeous game. Towards the end, I found myself torn between wanting to race to the conclusion, and trying to do as many of the side missions and acquire as many of the skill points as possible, because I knew I would never replay it after I finished the main story. Ultimately I favoured getting to the end with only an 84% completion rate. Even so, the last couple of hours felt like a slog: another set piece fight scene? Another jaw-dropping location I have to race through? Overall, still pretty good. It makes me even more excited about the upcoming Uncharted 4.
I first heard Halsey on Zane Lowe’s show on Beats 1 in September of last year. In the CET time zone, we get the show early in the morning, between 7 and 8. I listen to it while I’m preparing Alex and Fiona’s lunch boxes. I have my iPad mini perched on top of Abi’s red coffee machine while I’m bagging up sandwiches and snacks. “Drive” came on, with the sounds of a car starting and a haunting six-note theme that repeats throughout the song and is never resolved. I was entranced. There are only a few songs that bring back such a strong memory of the time I first heard them: Loneliness Shines by Malcolm Middleton on a late night drive through Dollar in Scotland; Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap on a drive home from work along the Edinburgh bypass from the Gyle to Gilmerton, just past the ski slope. I’m amused by the fact that “Drive” is another one, when those others happened while I was driving.
So I started listening to the rest of the album Badlands and pointed it out to Fiona, who listened to it and loved it as well. By the time we were both completely sucked in, and checked to see if she was touring near us, it was too late – her gig at Melkweg (which had already been moved from the Oude Zaal to the larger-capacity The Max) was sold out. So once again I got us after-market tickets. After the fun experience of bringing one of Fiona’s friends with us to see Taylor Swift, I got three tickets for Halsey so that Fiona could bring someone along again.
Fiona’s last few concerts (Imagine Dragons, Dotan, Fall Out Boy, Taylor Swift) have all been at huge venues. The great thing about smaller venues like Melkweg is how close you are to the artists. We were keen to get to the gig early (doors open at 19:00, opening act Børns at 19:30, Halsey at 20:40) so that we could be very close to the front. (Fiona is stretching out as a teenager, but we’re in the land of the Tall People.) We picked up her friend at 18:30 and drove to Amsterdam. I had booked a parking place at Byzantium, just near the Leidseplein.
After parking just after 19:00, the three of us walked to Leidseplein where I stopped at an ATM. I noticed a long line of people stretching past the front of the Stadsschouwburg. I assumed that they were queueing up for the theatre, but no. As we crossed the square in the direction of Melkweg, we noticed people wearing Halsey shirts, and discovered that the line went all the way from Melkweg to the far side of the Stadsschouwburg. I was shocked, because I’m used to places like Melkweg and Paradiso still being half-empty while the opening act is on stage, but Fiona really had the wind knocked out of her. The queue was moving very slowly, and she wasn’t convinced we would even make it inside by the time of the concert, let alone get a place where a non-tall person could get a good view. With that size of a crowd, there was no way we would have been at the front even if we had arrived twenty minutes earlier.
We stood around quietly in the cold for a while, shuffling forward a few meters every few minutes. I was sure we’d get in, but when 19:25 passed and we had only just rounded the corner of the Schouwburg, I didn’t think we’d catch any of Børns’ set. To our great relief, that was when Melkweg crowd control showed up. Turns out that Taylor Davis was playing the Sugar Factory opposite Melkweg that night, and the two queues trying to squeeze down a crowded Lijnbaansgracht had merged into one confused whole. They moved the Taylor Davis crowd to the other side of the street so that the Halsey crowd could get through. It only took us a couple of minutes to get in after that. Judging by the mounds of food and drink debris near the railings outside the Melkweg doors, I think some fans must have been queueing up there all afternoon to get in as soon as the doors opened.
Fiona and her friend brightened with excitement as soon as crowd control cleared our way. We had a tense couple of minutes when we discovered there was no way we’d get a good view from the back of the crowd at ground level. We made our way up to the left balcony, and found a few spaces where the girls could push themselves up high enough to see over the people who had bagged the premium balcony spots, and have a reasonable sight line to the stage. I’m a head taller, so it was easier for me. It still wasn’t great, but it would do.
Børns came on at about 19:50. They played “Seeing Stars” as an opener, which has a solid pop beat and made a good impression. The rest of the set, of which I only recognized “American Money” and “Electric Love” also seemed to go down well. With Børns’ tall, skinny, long-haired looks, I couldn’t get away from the impression that Dr. Spencer Reid had got his groove together and formed a band.
After Børns there was a break for the crew to set up the stage, and for us to visit the super-quiet merch stand. (We didn’t all go at once — we didn’t want to lose our places. Neither did anyone else.) Ten minutes before 21:00, the lights went down to much excitement, but Halsey didn’t come on quite yet. The sound desk played a couple of anthem songs that the crowd sang along to: “Tear in my Heart” by Twenty One Pilots and “Sorry” by Justin Bieber. (Note: I didn’t recognize these songs at all. I had to ask Fiona for advice here!) And finally, shortly after 21:00: Halsey.
Wow. I’ve been to a fair few concerts at Melkweg and Paradiso, but I’ve never seen that level of fan adulation at such a small venue. Almost everyone sang along to almost every lyric. Every song was greeted with rapturous screams. Her songs speak to her fans in a deeply personal way. One of the biggest cheers came between songs, when she told the audience, “I see all of you.” When the gig was over, I saw young women crying as they walked to the exit. On our way out, we saw at least a hundred fans surrounding the tour buses parked on the Lijnbaansgracht, waiting around to catch a glimpse of Halsey on her way to her next gig. I don’t think I’ll see her in a venue of this size again.
She put on a great show. Halsey projects a magnetic, powerful, yet relatable personality in a self-confidend package on stage. She doesn’t have many moves, but she has enormous presence. Her supporting band stuck to the background, with no spotlight or attention. They were almost as much part of the backdrop as the excellent video wall behind the stage. In fact, some of the most memorable visuals were when the band was silhouetted against the hard blue light of the video wall during “Colors II”, which they played as the warm-up to the big finale “Colors”. It was one of the best concerts I’ve been to where I’ve had such a poor view. (The photos are from me holding my arm out as far as I could.)
