A note on skrang-iness...

Well, I'm not sure if this is one of the musical memes which Pandora uses to identify and quantify your musical tastes, however, "skranginess" is definitely the spin of one of my own musical quarks. WOXY just played Soon, by My Bloody Valentine, and props to them, it was exactly what I needed to get going on a thursday morning. Anyways, the song is driven by an intermittent wall of white noise "skrang" (plus snappy rhythm session and a quirky lolloping sample, but it's the skrang that drives the jeep, so to speak).

It's pretty much the first thing I pick up on in a song I haven't heard before. "That sounds like fun to play..." I find myself thinking, cause let's face it, making noise is fun. And playing air guitar like Pete Townsend, amirite?

There's a great moment in one of the live recordings on the Joy Division collection Still where I guess somebody hands Ian Curtis a guitar. I mean, the guy couldn't play it, but he could certainly injure it.

I've been really enjoying the underrated blog, which recently blogged on the Band of Horses album (which I love, and is really really skrangy), which brought to mind the Valentines, who then just happened to play on the radio, so thanks underrated, and thanks WOXY!

Thursday morning, rough draft...

So I managed to catch my bus at quarter after six this morning, figuring I would have the whole bus to myself, and get a bit of writing done. Well, I could hardly get a seat, so there you go. I managed to throw a few lines together AT THE BUS STOP!

when whales ruled the world

when whales ruled the world, there were no hard edges,
and no sharp corners, and all the world was one

when whales ruled the world, instead of surfaces,
above and beyond, there was only one surface between,
folding itself into watery baleen to filter meaning from the shores

when whales ruled the world, every grain of sand was sacred,
and you might see yourself through the folds, amongst them and within

when whales ruled the world,
there was a time before enjambment became a word,
and a single sentence could measure out an era


I am currently listening to the latest eXplorations podcast (#5 on Open Office)... it's an interesting one, but like all of these podcasts, very dense, and requiring a second listen.

1) We are living in a technological "Era of Abstraction"
2) It costs more and more to support a suite, but this should be less and less important, as products interact with each other better through service orientation, abstraction, mash-ups etc.
3) Customization is superceding the older "Suite" technology, so (Kurt's line) if you are giving it away for free, the need to customize arrives as a corollary. Interesting stuff.

Katie, Jack and I went to the Moss Street Paint-in this weekend, which Jack (2 1/2) loved, begging money off his parents to deposit in the music cases of various street musicians and so forth. We saw some friends we hadn't for a while, and all in all made for a perfect start to a great weekend.

We stopped to watch one of the buskers playing the Neil Young song "Helpless", with an acoustic guitar and one of those harmonica around the neck jobbies. I couldn't help thinking, wow, what an amazing moment - there are few songs that just, well, bring tears to my eyes, but that sure is one of them. There's just so much honesty to Neil Young's music and lyrics, whether you're listening to a goofy song like "Winterlong", a tear-jerker like "Helpless" or a long-walks-on-the-beacher like "Harvest Moon". Good stuff!

Quick food for thought before the bus comes:

Here I am fixing bugs again. It's possibly what I do best. I like to think of myself as an innovator, but... well, there's the thing... until I have a stupid nasty problem to overcome, there is no real scope for innovation. Innovation for innovation's sake is less fruitful than innovation that gets you out of a corner you or someone else has painted you into. Is this glory seeking, or is it just the nature of fixing things? It's not finished until you break it, fix it, reinvent it, and then ship it.

Wow, a lot changes in a couple months! We (myself, my lovely wife and irrascible child) have made the move from the mid-island to the south-island, and I am working at a new job, which in the technology sector should come as no surprise, and though it was a shock, it came as now surprise when they stopped paying me at my last job! So I am now a Java developer where once I was a JavaScripter... no big deal, life is elsewhere, after all!

Currently listening to: Sufjan Stevens on WOXY 97x - I don't tend to listen to really melodramatic music on my own time (though I find myself listening to the Magnetic Fields/6ths more and more, and I grew up on the Smiths and the Cure)... but when I'm at work, I alternate between a need for Public Enemy and Elliot Smith, wither way, it keeps me awake.

I love WOXY! I heard Gnarls Barkley's Crazy playing in the grocery store yesterday, and I thought, well it's summertime, whatever... but there you go, they were playing it six months before the album came out, and props to that.