I’ve been enjoying the band Meute for some time, and I got the chance to see them live at Paradiso a few weeks ago. It was great to be back at Paradiso again. It has an amazing atmosphere, and it’s probably my favourite live music venue. (“Probably”… Can I think of any others I enjoy more? King Tut’s in Glasgow is good, but I’ve only been there once.)
There wasn’t a warm-up act for the gig. It was a busy day at work and I couldn’t leave the house as early as I’d liked but I got there about 19:45 anyway, for a start at 20:30. Just like Hedon in Zwolle, Paradiso has replaced its cloakroom and bag storage with automated lockers. You scan a QR code, pay a small fee for the size of the locker you want (€3.50 or €5.50) and then you get a personal page to a numbered locker that you can open whenever you want throughout the evening. And NO NEED TO DOWNLOAD AN APP. It’s a bit more expensive than when I used to hand my coat to a human (con), and obviously the venue doesn’t have to pay those humans a wage to operate the clockroom (con). But the venues have had a hard time during the pandemic and lockdowns, and I don’t begrudge them trying to optimize to keep things going. There was still at least one human on hand to help out with locker issues.
Even though I arrived at a time I felt was quite “late” I was still able to secure myself a spot right up at the stage, where was able to snap a photo of the set list (and peel it off to take home with me at the end of the night… :shiftyeyes:). I’ve made a habit of memorizing gig sets as they’re played so I can add them to setlist.fm afterwards, but I often rely on cues from the lyrics of the songs being played to help me position them in a memory palace. Because most of Meute’s repertoire is instrumental, I was glad to have this to fall back on.
The gig itself was good. The band didn’t spend much energy on chatting to the audience between songs, but the crowd didn’t need them to whip up excitement. The vibe was already there. Everyone was having a great time. I was really glad to have ear protection with me, because I was standing right in front of the enormous speaker stacks, and the bass was booming in my chest the whole night. The band’s regular bass drummer, Marco Möller, wasn’t there there night, but the guy who replaced him was equally impressive: he maintained a steady 124 BPM on the marching band bass drum the whole night long. Dude was a machine.
Standing right up close to the stage allowed me to get some nice photos even with my old iPhone X. I was using the Halide app most of the time, so I was able to tweak the pictures a bit more than usual afterwards. Kinda made me wish for something like a Ricoh GR III, though.
I’m taking a break from the OP course this year. Although I registered for the research project at the start of the academic year, I then immediately deferred it for a year, because otherwise I would have lost access to the library and student forums. Although the University Of London allows one to take the course over five years, its systems can’t cope with the idea that someone might not take any modules in a given year. Oh well.
I’m trying to keep my reading in the field to gather ideas for my own project, and to keep up with my classmates in the WhatsApp group that Mona set up, and learn from the experiences of others as they work towards their proposals. One thing that’s on my mind as classmates talk about how many references they should be expected to include in a 3000-word proposal, or whether in-line references are part of the word count, is the nature of academic writing in general.
I love science, I love writing, and I love good scientific writing, but the writers I admire most are more scientific educators than academics. Adam Mastroianni recently wrote about how academic incentives based on publications and citations (“publish or perish”) has also led to a perverse (my word, not his) writing style in scientific papers (via Miguel de Icaza on Mastodon):
For example, you used to be able to write a scientific paper with style. Now, in order to please reviewers, you have to write it like a legal contract. Papers used to begin like, “Help! A mysterious number is persecuting me,” and now they begin like, “Humans have been said, at various times and places, to exist, and even to have several qualities, or dimensions, or things that are true about them, but of course this needs further study (Smergdorf & Blugensnout, 1978; Stikkiwikket, 2002; von Fraud et al., 2018b)”.
He references a paper of his own, “Things could be better” (Mastroianni & Peery, 2022), which presents the results of nine rigorous studies in a very modern and informal style that tries to put the findings front and centre, without letting the language get in the way. For the purposes of reading it from start to finish, the paper is well-structured, but the difference between the article and a typical modern academic paper is like the difference between a chapter of Dickensian prose and a Twitter recap thread.
In the Research Methods module of the course we covered the “standard structure” of modern scientific papers: why they have a particular format (abstract, intro, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) and why we shouldn’t read a paper linearly from start to finish. But, you know, I like reading a paper from start to finish. Precision and clarity of language is important, but so is acceptance and adoption.
In just about every single module of the OP course at Birkbeck the subject of the “academic-practitioner gap” comes up. I agree with Mastroianni that we can do better, and that we don’t have to sacrifice accuracy and rigour to make scientific more accessible to a wider audience. When it comes to writing, I look to people like Ed Yong at The Atlantic, and Beth Mole at Ars Technica as role models. I’d love to write my Masters dissertation in the style Mastroianni highlights, but I also want to get a good grade when I hand it in…
Additional notes:
In her book Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra suggests the question, “who do you admire?” as a prompt for thinking about career direction. There are many reasons for me not to do a PhD after this Masters course, but one of them is that I just don’t aspire to continue to write in the academic style.
Via Ted Pavlic on Mastodon, via Mark Rubin (source of many good links) I found another good article about clarity in academic writing: “Finding your scientific story by writing backwards” by Montagnes, Montagnes & Yang (2022). The authors discuss creating a “scientific story” by starting the writing process with results and conclusions, and working your way backwards to methodology and introduction. Going against the established order has risks as well. The old saying about needing to understand the rules before you can break them applies.
Abi & I took a walk around the rowing lake in het Amsterdamse Bos yesterday. I brought my 50-230 lens with me, and got what I think is my favourite bird photo of the year. Nothing fancy, just a robin on a branch.
In my wrap-up post for 2021 I mentioned that Abi and I had been systematically working our way back in time through the Guardian’s archive of Quiptic crosswords. At the start of our run I took notes on which ones we’d done, and how hard we found them. That didn’t last, but it’s how I know we started with Quiptic 1129 on 23 July 2021.
Just yesterday we reached a particular milestone with Quiptic 562, from 23 August 2010. This is when crossword puzzling site FifteenSquared started covering the weekly Quiptic. The bloggers at FifteenSquared not only provide solutions, but they also analyze and comment (often sarcastically) on the clues and the parsings. This has been very useful for us in getting better at solving cryptic crosswords. But because we’ve been working our way back in time, this means we’ve now exhausted that assistance. Training wheels are off, and we’re on our own now.
The grid for Quiptic 562
From 23 July 2021 to 26 December 2022 is 521 days. From Quiptic 1129 to 562 is 567 puzzles, so on average we’re doing just over one a day. At this rate we’ll get back to the Quiptic 1 from 23 November 1999 in another 516 days, which would be around 25 May 2024 – another year and a few months.
The time travel aspect of going backwards through the archive is interesting. Although the Quiptic mostly stays away from contemporary cultural references, it does sometimes help to know who was prime minister (PM) in the UK in any given year. For future time travellers, 2022 is going to be a weird one.
I only discovered De Staat in September this year. My excuse is that I don’t listen to the radio much, and my music discovery experience has been fairly narrow in the last several years. When I was younger I was afraid that my musical taste would get stuck in the 1980s or 1990s, and I’d end up listening to golden oldies for the rest of my days. That’s not happening, but I do need the occasional prod out of my comfort zone to go and find new things.
Seeing live music is a good opportunity to see new bands in support of acts I already know and like. For example, Bleu supporting Toad The Wet Sprocket; Thumpers supporting Chvrches.) I follow some shared playlists on Spotify, and get recommendations from music channels at work. I occasionally dip into the Stereogum blog, which is where I found MUNA this year (just too late to catch their European tour). I find that podcasts have taken the place of music radio when I’m driving these days. Although I enjoy the podcasts, I do think I’m missing out a bit there. If I’d been tuning in to Dutch radio (e.g. Kink.fm) at all in the last five years I would have heard De Staat and known that they’re huge here.
Torre Florim dancing across the stage
They’ve been touring Europe this year, and have just kicked off a string of completely sold-out gigs here in the Netherlands. The secondary market for tickets seemed to run through TicketSwap. I signed up for alerts to a handful of dates relatively nearby. TicketSwap send out push notifications through their app whenever a ticket for a gig you’re interested in comes up for sale. From my experience at work, I know that push notifications don’t reach every target at exactly the same time. Depending on how big the batch is, it can take seconds or minutes for all the notifications to be delivered. In the case of these gigs, the TicketSwap app showed that there were hundreds of other people also wanting to buy tickets for them.
But I got lucky, and a few weeks ago I happened to respond quickly enough to bag a ticket for their concert in Zwolle on 24 November: the opening night of their Dutch tour, even!
Ticket for De Staat in Zwolle
After last week’s experience with resale tickets, I was feeling somewhat apprehensive about using this ticket for De Staat. However, it looks like TicketSwap have actual integrations with ticketing platforms, and when someone wants to sell their (digital) ticket, they have the ability to invalidate the original ticket and issue a brand new one for the buyer. Inside the TicketSwap app, the ticket had had my name on it. The app also seemed to make it a very easy operation if I wanted to sell the ticket on again. TicketSwap have a policy of not allowing more than a 20% markup over the original price when reselling tickets, which is impressive and admirable.
Zwolle is about an hour and a half away by car. Late Thursday afternoon I got caught up in a production incident at work, and left later than I’d intended, but I made it there shortly before 20:00. I parked nearby, walked to the venue, and got in without a problem. I think I’d been holding my breath a bit when my ticket was scanned, but it was all OK first time round. YAY.
My first thought on entering the foyer was: wow, this is a very different crowd than last Sunday. Let’s say that if I could be uniquely identified as “the old guy with the blue hair” at the Set It Off gig; here I was just “the guy with the blue hair”. I’d say the audience was mostly in their 30s and 40s. At Set It Off I’d heard lots of English voices; here it was all Dutch. Relaxed vibe. My hair got a few looks, but I didn’t feel out of place.
I’d arrived just a little late to see the whole opening act, but I caught the last twenty minutes of Personal Trainer, and enjoyed them. De Staat came on at 21:05.
They played all the tracks from their latest releases RED and YELLOW, but only “One Day” from BLUE. That makes sense, because it’s a live event, and they wanted to keep the energy going, and the BLUE songs are the more down-tempo ones. Overall, they chose a ton of crowd-pleasers (“Input Source Select”, “Make Way For The Passenger”) from their back catalogue, although they did include a couple of moodier tracks as well.
I’ve got to say: wow. This was an astonishingly good gig. The band were tight, and the songs were made to get the audience jumping. Singer Torre Florim is visually striking, and he’s a gripping showman on stage. His physical performance reminded me a bit of Duncan Wallis of Dutch Uncles. He has completely different moves, but he’s similarly mesmerising. For the song “Pikachu” keyboardist Rocco Hueting joined him on centre stage for their ridiculously simple but brilliantly staged dance-off. That alone was worth the price of entry.
Rocco Hueting and Torre Florim doing their Pikachu dance
The audience knew what they were doing. In their best-known music video (although the band have got an amazing overall track record) for the song “Witch Doctor”, a giant crowd of computer-animated figures jump and dance in a whirling circle around Torre as he performs the song. At their gigs, where they build up to this as the last song in the main set, this translates into a moshing maelstrom in front of the stage, as the audience turns into a human gyre in front of the stage. (I was just outside it. If you attend one of their shows, it’s worth knowing about!)
They closed out the show with a 3-track encore, ending on the hefty dramatic beats of “Kitty Kitty”, which made full use of their colourful lighting rigs. Aside from being a stormingly good performance by the band, the light show was clever and complemented the songs brilliantly.
They closed the night with Kitty Kitty, using the same red and blue colour scheme as in the music video
Definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen in recent years. I’ll be keeping an eye out for future tours, because I’d love to see them again.
In the autumn of 2019 when I was assembling a set of (second-hand) speakers to fill out a 5.1 configuration for our living room, I bought a highly customized 20-year-old Wharfedale Topaz SW-10 subwoofer for €50. The dude I bought it from was an electronics tinkerer, and he’d ripped out the guts of the original speaker and built a custom cabinet around it. Going by old photos on the internet, the vanilla Topaz SW-10 was a chonk already; but the custom case was a beast. It also fit really nicely next to our TV cabinet, and was sturdy enough to rest our massive lamp on. Or a small elephant.
It had always had a bit of a persistent low hum while idling. A couple of weeks ago when we put the furniture back after the kitchen building works I rearranged all the wiring behind the cabinet. When I plugged the subwoofer back in it made angry buzzing noises and then shut up altogether. Boo.
My analogue electronics knowledge is…limited. I took the back panel off, couldn’t see anything obviously wrong or burned out, and put it back together again. I connected it with different power and signal cables. I didn’t have a different amp that I could plug it into to see if the problem lay with the SW output of my amp, but the amp was fine in all other respects, so I thought that was unlikely to be at fault. Abi and I took a tour of some of the second-hand shops in the area, and I found a compatible (but much smaller and less powerful) Sony subwoofer for €12.50. I plugged it in back home, and it worked just fine. So the problem was with the SW-10.
In the hope of being able to revive it, I brought the subwoofer to Akkerman Electronics in Wormerveer. Ron Akkerman examined it and said he could fix it, but it would be expensive: more than I’d paid for it in the first place. Also, because the thing had seen so much tinkering, he wouldn’t be able to offer a guarantee to go with the repair.
So I’m on the lookout for another second-hand subwoofer now. But I wanted to post this as a reminder to myself, and as a recommendation to others that Akkerman Electronicsexists and is good. Good-quality analogue audio equipment like amplifiers and speakers lasts for decades if you treat them right, and they’re often very repairable. I like buying new gear (just bought a Sonos Oe SL for the kitchen), but I also like getting a bargain. I’m content to roll with the (wimpy) €12.50 Sony subwoofer until a nice second-hand deal comes around.
