Legends of the Sun Pig

Fiona and I went to see the Art of the Brick exhibition at Amsterdan Expo last Sunday. It’s the collection of LEGO art works by Nathan Sawaya. The pieces on display are a mixed bag. Some are genuinely notable, such as the headline “Yellow” (the yellow torso ripping open his own chest), while others are interesting only because they are made with LEGO. There’s a lot of inane and whimsical filler, too, but what the exhibition does really well is inspire. This is Sawaya’s stated goal: art was a creative outlet for him while he was working in a job that didn’t fulfil him. He wants to show every visitor that it doesn’t take expensive materials to make something beautiful or clever or fun. Anyone can do it, which is a great message.

Apart from liking The Ting Tings’s first album in its own right, I have always been amused by the fact that Jules De Martino played drums for obscure and long-forgotten band Babakoto in the eighties. Their one single, “Just To Get By” didn’t make much of a splash, but I loved it. I still have it on a cassette tape somewhere — from back in the days when “downloading” meant hoping you could press “record” quickly enough when it came on the radio. Gosh.

Anyway, I just kind of skipped over The Ting Tings’s second album. I remember reading some interviews in which they talked about why it had taken them four years to put it together, and seeing a few luke-warm reviews, and I never got around to listening to it at all. When I was booking tickets for upcoming gigs a month or two ago, I saw that they were playing Paradiso…and I ignored the date. My mind didn’t even register that a tour implied a new album.

It was only when I saw the new album Super Critical featured in iTunes (while I was buying Taylor Swift’s 1989) that it caught my attention. I’ve been listening to Super Critical and their second album Sounds from Nowheresville on Spotify for the last couple of days and they’re really quite good. Not storming chart hits, but there are some excellent tracks on there. Super Critical is short and sweet, with lots of funky Nile Rodgers-style guitar licks and updated disco beats. Sounds from Nowheresville is more complex and varied: punky on “Guggenheim”, low-key synth-powered “One By One”, flat-out rocking out on “Give It Back”.

So I’ve just booked my ticket to see them at Paradiso on Sunday 16th November. Should be good.

Area 11 have a new EP out next week, and are on tour in the UK in November. Unfortunately my travel doesn’t quite mesh up, and I’ll miss their dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Next time, maybe.

Echopraxia didn’t really work for me. I found the main character (Daniel Brüks) the least sympathetic of a bland cast. The novel is packed full of fascinating scientific ideas, but they came across as either too fleeting or overly didactic. In fact, the clearest presentation of the ideas came in the appendix at the end, which is richly footnoted and contains enough links for a solid year of further reading.

On the plane to Edinburgh this week I watched Killing Them Softly, which was tried to be earnest in its black humour, but only succeeded in being bleak and needlessly gory. The parallels between the underworld economy and the 2008 financial collapse are laid on thick and unsubtly. Two and a half stars, ish? My perception may have been coloured by the fact that I watched almost all of it while the plane was stuck on the tarmac for an hour waiting for an exit slot, after having already been delayed by an hour and a half because of thunder storms. At least it wasn’t cancelled.

Wednesday evening was a curry at Omar Khayyam’s and a drink at Thomson’s with Woody. Wasn’t feeling too great on Thursday; stayed in and binged on the first half of season 1 of Continuum on Netflix. I finished watching the rest of the season today, and it’s pretty decent. Not enormously original, but entertaining. The ten episodes risked falling into a repetitive pattern in the middle, but towards the end it kept raising more questions and introducing new elements that kept the tension high. Liked it.

Listening: Settle by Disclosure is hitting my EDM sweet spot right now. “Latch” is a radio favourite here in NL, but I’m not tired of it yet. The closing track, “Help Me Lose My Mind” features a shimmering tambourine that sounds like the ghost of a pneumatic drill just outside my window. If I’m deep in concentration, it really does occasionally make me look up and wonder why there are roadworks at midnight. Good work delivering on that title.

Ryan Gantz – Getting Out of the Woods: A Primer on Not Being a Music Hater (via waxy.org)

I like music. All different types of music. There are so many kinds! You should feel free to listen to whatever music speaks to you. I do.

But the hard thing about music (and all types of art) is that speak can mean something different for every genre, artist, and album. The emotional, tonal, and verbal vocabulary of heavy metal is almost nothing like the vocabulary of jazz. The intention and cultural contexts differ. The listening experience goals for fans of hip-hop may be at odds with what a classical music-lover wants out of a great symphony.

And that means that it often requires intellectual/emotional openness and very close listening (or, like, dancing) to understand what a piece of music is getting at, what language it’s speaking, what feelings it wants to evoke—even who its target audience might be—before we can fairly judge what’s successful or unsuccessful about it.

That may all seem obvious. But as a consequence of these basic language differences, it’s really easy to criticize or dismiss work that falls outside a musical dialect we’re comfortable with, or the role music currently plays in our lives.

Zeynep Tufekci – What’s Wrong with Twitter’s Latest Experiment with Broadcasting Favorites:

Twitter claims this change showing favorites to others generates more engagement, and people sometimes click on the “favorited” tweet they have been shown.

I believe that but who cares?

The problem with this course of action is not that it doesn’t generate engagement, but that it violates the social expectation of the favoriter, who did not intend to broadcast this act, and steps over the social signal function of favorite, which for many has come to mean: “I’ve seen this [and appreciate it] but am choosing NOT to broadcast this to everyone but only conveying it to you.” It has other uses as well, (in fact, a researcher found 25 functions) but Twitter’s favorite is widely used by many as the opposite of Twitter’s broadcast, the retweet, as an individualized and quiet signal as the “notification” tab will show it to the user whose tweet was favorited, but will not broadcast it to all followers.

On the subject of signals, what do Medium’s teeny-tiny author bylines say about their attitude to the importance of “content creators”?

Exciting highlights from this last week:

• I finished consolidating all of the domain names I manage at a single registrar, gandi.net. Their admin tools are simple but powerful, and their interface isn’t constantly trying to upsell me to products I don’t need.
• I finished consolidating all these domains and sites on a pair of VPS instances at Linode in their London data centre. I’ve run sunpig.com on shared hosting at Pair.com for the last ten years or so, and they have been consistently excellent. However, I’m running more than just PHP and static HTML these days, and the extra flexibility of a VPS is welcome.
• Sunpig.com now runs over HTTPS instead of HTTP. I’m using gandi.net as my certificate provider as well, just to keep things simple. They don’t issue SHA2 certificates yet, but their latest newsletter says they will soon. I’ll upgrade when they arrive, and sort out forward secrecy at that point as well. Probably.

Okay, so not really exciting. But it’s all been on my todo list for, like, ever, and I’m glad to get it all nice and tidy. Server gardening.